


Fog on the Clyde Part IV

by AJHall



Series: Fog on the Clyde [4]
Category: Lord Peter Wimsey - Dorothy L. Sayers, Sky Captain & the World of Tomorrow (2004)
Genre: Alternate History, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-09
Updated: 2014-10-11
Packaged: 2018-02-20 12:16:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 30,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2428379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AJHall/pseuds/AJHall
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The concluding instalment. All plot threads come together as the villains' true purposes are revealed and the extent of the conspiracy is found to have penetrated even more deeply than anyone thought possible.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. .  With zero hour approaching, Joe finds the number of people whom he can trust is vanishingly small

The butler entered, bearing a yellow envelope in the middle of a silver salver, and carried it with a slow dignity to the gangly, pale boy who sat at the head of the table with a slightly nervous air as if wondering how he'd got there. 

Indeed, Joe thought, casting a glance round the chilly eighteenth century elegance of the panelled dining room, Paul Shuttleworth might well have reason to wonder at being deferred to in this company. He was the youngest person in the room; his only near-contemporary, seated at his left, was clothed in all the assurance that being the sole heir to one of the oldest Dukedoms in England and having the looks of a young Adonis might be expected to afford a man. The alchemical power great wealth - the sort of wealth which this room indicated with every understated line - confers upon its possessor had been disclaimed by Shuttleworth himself. When they had all congregated here earlier that day he had freely confessed that his father - while in no way allied to Mosley and his treasonous crew - nonetheless regarded their threat as phantasmagorical, born out of his son's reading "too many John Buchan shockers". He had told his son and heir in no uncertain terms to get back to his proper business of achieving the academic honours his father craved by proxy, or risk being disinherited. That was the reason, it turned out, why the presence of this heterogenous group at his family home had had to be camouflaged as a gathering of friends for a belated 22nd birthday dinner.

Then the shy gangling young man had dipped his chin, and added, "But that doesn't matter, of course: I have to do what I must. I'm in, however Dad takes it, you do know that, don't you?"

Momentarily, Joe had been taken aback. They had been in the cool elegance of the entrance hall of the Shuttleworth mansion out near Helensburgh, and from where Joe had been standing he could see the mansion's grounds falling away to the lake, and his Warhawk parked by the private airstrip beyond it at such a distance that the powerful plane was diminished to the size of a child's toy. It had suddenly reminded him by force of sheer contrast of the run-down set of rooms in West London that had been his family's last home before he'd got out of there forever at 15, lying outrageously about his age and attaching himself first as a dogsbody, mechanic and runaround and then, seizing the faintest slender possibility of a chance, as one of the daredevil motorbike riders on a touring Wall of Death. He'd clawed his way outwards and upwards, aiming always for the sky, the memory of those dingy, noisy, overcrowded rooms, the peeling wallpaper and the sour smell of long-boiled cabbage on the stairs acting as the spur which had driven him onwards in those early days.

It had occurred to him to wonder since then how much the sense of space - of having grown up never having felt cramped for room to turn round - had attracted him to Franky in the first place. She carried this Palladian serenity around with her; they had formed part of her being. She had grown up breathing a more spacious air than he had ever known, and it had shaped her beauty and her authority both.

It was almost humbling to see the readiness with which young Shuttleworth was prepared to sacrifice that birthright for the sake of what he thought was right. And for a moment he had been lost for words. But Dex, bless him, had grinned up at the kid, bright-eyed, and drawled lazily, "Keep your hair on. From what I've seen of your designs, you'll never starve. If your father kicks you out any design shop that knows diddleysquat about engineering would take you on in a heartbeat. We certainly would. But your father's no greenhorn. He's not about to lose a design wizard to the competition if he's half the man they tell me he is."

The tall gangling lad had flushed with confusion, and not seemed to know what to say. It occurred to Joe that it was perhaps the first time that he had been sure that any compliment had not been addressed more to the Palladian expanses he represented than to himself. And that perhaps however broad one's ancestral acres might be, they could still be as cramping and confining as the meanest set of West London rooms when they became the prism through which your every action came to be viewed.

As Paul Shuttleworth opened the telegram Joe cast a look around the dining room, which was wreathed in blue clouds of after-dinner smoke.

MacAllister was sitting back in his chair, having declined the excellent cigars which were being passed round but accepted the no-less-superb port; he was engaged in an animated discussion with Charlie Cook and Chris Sugden, to whom Charlie appeared to have taken in a big way. Helen Adamson sat opposite them, contributing an occasional comment. Earlier she had asserted with all the force her cousin Franky might have brought to bear on the question the right not to be banished in solitary state while the gentlemen sat over port and cigars. Chris and the old engineer MacAllister had backed her to the hilt, but their championship, in Joe's opinion, had been wholly unnecessary: she had gained a new assurance since learning how crucial her intervention had been not only to Polly's fate but to preserving the crucial intelligence she had gathered. 

From the Legion there was LeFauve - a blessed inspiration of Dex, that, to bring the Méti back with him last week, when they'd blown unexpectedly in a breath ahead of a sequence of storm fronts that had closed the Atlantic skyways for the next four days even to the most audacious of the Legion's pilots. In Joe's opinion, there was no finer reconnaissance pilot to be found on this Earth than LeFauve, and his worth in the present venture - as Joe would shortly reveal to the assembled company - had already proved itself to be beyond price.

And then, of course, there was Dex himself; sitting to Joe's right and, so carefully, not looking at him, in a way that Joe found, unexpectedly, almost unbearably touching. It was as though Dex too recognised what he himself felt about this thing they had found between them over the last six weeks; something which felt so natural and inevitable that Joe sometimes thought that it must have been carved in hieroglyphics on the Great Pyramid.

Shuttleworth looked up and tapped a fork on the side of a glass to gain attention. When the talk fell silent and they turned their heads to look at him he gulped convulsively, twice, looking suddenly very young. "It's from my cousin Francesca. She sends her apologies for missing my birthday dinner. It seems the _Albion_ 's been ordered into surprise exercises in the North Atlantic."

Charlie jerked up suddenly from his half-slumped position behind the desk, and turned to twitch back the heavy brocade curtains behind him. Helen, her shoulders bare in the black silk evening gown she was wearing, shivered as the icy draught made its way through the cracks in the casement. The blizzard which had sprung up in the early evening was still raging, the whirling snowflakes plastering against the glass and the wind howling.

Charlie turned back to the table. "Lovely weather the Admiralty seems to have chosen for it."

 

His voice was light, non-committal. His fingers, curved round the stem of his glass, told a different story. Joe thought if there was something he could say. Before he could think of anything Helen's hand stole out, timidly, and wrapped itself around Charlie's. Charlie exhaled, slumping back in his seat.

"And the other two Fortress-class vessels attached to Home Fleet are into Devonport for refitting," Sugden observed. They looked at him in surprise, and he shrugged. "Letter this morning. The Admiralty don't care for Union men, but they can't keep them out of the Royal Dockyards if they want to maintain Fleet at all. I've asked the odd lad I can rely on to keep his ear to the ground. And the Fortress-class aren't the only big-gun vessels to be taken out of commission unexpectedly. I doubt - if one added it up, which no-one official seems to be doing - 'cept Churchill, of course, the _Daily Worker_ said today he preoperly gave 'em what for last night at a meeting in Manchester, it almost made me forgive him for Tonypandy - the Home Fleet is 50% of the strength it should be, by right. "

It was the longest speech he had made since he had arrived; Joe guessed he'd found the tangible evidence of capitalist excess through which he was moving intimidating.   
Nevertheless, he was listened to in respectful silence, and when he had finished a murmur of assent ran round the candle-lit, panelled room.

"Aye, I can smell it. Things are beginning to move, right enough," MacAllister said. "There's uncanny things stirring along the Broomielaw; Wee Tammie's been a good pair of eyes and ears these last three weeks, and a wee laddie can go where a grown man might be noted. And he tells me there's been a rash of back-yard orators been stirring up trouble whenever they've found a few idle souls to listen. Oh, ye'll always find a few. But these last weeks they've clustered thicker than wasps round a honeypot - aye, and the bobbies have no been so fast as they might to move them along, notwithstanding they've been stirring trouble."

The young blond aristocrat at Shuttleworth's side smiled, slightly grimly. "And just when Uncle Peter might have been useful, he's stuck in some bally Balkan backwater, whose foreign minister just seems to have got himself assassinated, and the ruling prince wants him to stay and investigate the murder and make sure the howling mob doesn't go taking matters into their own hands and lynch the wrong chap for the murder, don't you know?"

There was the sharp sound of indrawn breath, and an uneasy silence fell on the room. They were all acutely aware that before now a Balkan assassination had proved the trigger for a maelstrom of blood and destruction that had borne 15 million lives away before its force had been spent.

The time had come. Deliberately Joe leant forward, catching Dex's eye. Dex gave him the faintest perceptible nod. He withdrew the thin, airmail letter and the photograph from the breast pocket of his dinner jacket.

"You're right. I doubt we've more than a day - two at the most - before the balloon goes up." He tapped the blue paper with his forefinger. "Fortunately - and thanks to some pretty good intelligence work from a number of people - we've got some sensible material to work on at last."

He'd alerted young Shuttleworth before the dinner, and the lad had prepared; right on cue the butler re-entered with a footman, each bearing sheets of Ordnance survey six-inch-to-the-mile maps.  
They unrolled them ceremoniously on the table, weighting their corners down with the silver epergnes and candelabras which had formed the centre-piece of the table decoration.

Joe picked up the riding-crop someone must have left on the window-seat - Shuttleworth had a teenage sister at home, he'd confided; he thought he'd even caught a glimpse of her whisking round a bend of the elegant staircase, pigtails flying. 

"Right, then: this is the situation," he said, gesturing at the map with the end of the riding crop, and then from the startled expressions of most of the other guests, and the amused look Dex and LeFauve exchanged, realised that he must have slipped without knowing into "Legion briefing" mode.

He shrugged. "I hope by now all of you have realised that we're on our own here. This conspiracy has reached goodness only knows where; certainly we can't trust any official response. And we've just been called to action stations. So whether you were expecting it or not: sorry, but it's up to all of us to do what we can to stop it."

There were a few nods at that; he continued crisply on. "Thanks to the material the Legion seized in Canada we know how many cylinders of helium left the base in New Brunswick. Thanks to Petersen we know the name of the vessel they left on, too; the Elena Martinez." He paused, and looked at the old engineer. "And thanks to MacAllister's connections with the puffer skippers up and down the coast, we know the harbour the Elena Martinez off-loaded those cylinders at a few days ago."

The little leather loop at the end of the riding crop flicked down on the map, indicating a remote corner of North-West Sutherland.

"But we know more than that," he continued. He glanced down the long table; their faces were grave, as one might have expected, but calm, focussed only on the job ahead. An odd little bunch they might be, but he knew, suddenly, that he could ask any and all of them to follow him to the gates of Hell, and that they would do so without a backwards glance.

"Polly's been tracking down the US end of the conspiracy like a demon. And she came up with pure gold." The lightest flick, this time, with the end of the riding crop on the taut paper of the Ordnance Survey six-inch. It echoed like a gunshot in the silent room; they craned over to see where he had pointed.

"There's a big sporting estate - a few thousand acres or moorland and a twelve-head deer forest - just about here, it seems. Last year it had nothing much on it beyond a tumble-down shooting lodge, with more holes in its roof than a colander, and a few ghillies' cottages, That's before a Kansas oilman bought it, of course."

"Kansas," Dex said ruminatively, and looked up with an air of bland interest. "Lot of helium in Kansas, Cap. If you know how to get it out, that is."

Bless him for his ability to deliver the straight line. And for so much more - oh yes -

Joe coughed repressively. "Indeed so. And this oilman - we needn't put a name to him just yet, I daresay he's got a white-haired old mother who deserves to be spared the shame of it, and anyway, Polly's earned her scoop - has been contributing lots of it to the National Helium Reserve. Just like a good little patriot should."

He paused, knowing his smile was wide and feral - he saw it reflected back from him in the hungry, intent eyes of the audience a split-second before he caught sight of himself in the age-spotted gilt-framed mirror above the fireplace.

"Only - it seems his helium declarations and his IRS returns have been about keeping pace with each other. He's been black-marketing the stuff for years, but lately, it seems, he's decided to cut out the middle-man."

He flicked the centre of the map, blank apart from contour lines clustered thick as blackberries and the occasional spiky outline which conventionally depicted a sparse coppicing along the thin wiggly lines of river valleys.

"So, he bought the estate to bury some of the excess, from an impoverished laird who inherited from a brother who died at Passchendaele, and who probably hadn't been able to pay off the death duties in two decades. And here's what it looks like now."

He spun the photograph he had been holding down onto the map on the table; it was dark and blurry, but when he'd first seen it in the dim red light of the hastily converted bathroom/darkroom he'd almost kissed LeFauve for the sheer nerve and brilliance that had produced it, and he wouldn't have swapped that photograph for one of Jean Harlow stark naked on a sable rug.

"There," he said. "Taken yesterday afternoon at precisely 12.45." His glance passed down the table again. LeFauve's long-tailed eyes were dark and enigmatic. "There's the carcase of the airship on the terracing in front of the new house our man's building - note that it's partially inflated already. And there are the rest of the gasbags and the cylinders stacked close by."

It took Dex's quiet voice to put into words what most of those in the room, Joe suspected, had also spotted in the blurry photograph. "And there's a good half-dozen warbirds standing by to defend it."

Joe made an airy gesture. "Nothing we can't handle. Haven't handled before. And the good news is that they don't seem to have replaced the two they lost last month. Either when it comes to pilots or 'planes, they aren't sitting on unlimited resources."  
Dex emitted an audible and expressive snort. "Sure, Cap. Just nearly. Enough to paralyse all the Fortress-class vessels in home waters. And without a Fortress-class - once the weapon's mounted aboard the airship - well, I daresay things could get a mite sticky."

He paused, his frustration and despair showing clearly enough through the resolute façade he was presenting to the assembled company. They had gone through this together, yesterday, in exhaustive detail, and Joe knew what the problems were. The others didn't, though, and Dex was the acknowledged expert here; it wouldn't do any harm to let him tell them the scale of the problem.  
"Tell us, Dex." His voice was low and fierce. "Why won't we neutralise the weapon, if we can outgun the 'birds and take down the airship?"

Dex shrugged; his face was infinitely bleak, like a hopeless dawn breaking over a barren land to which spring would never come again. And the note in his voice had the dull sound of earth falling on a coffin lid. "Read the weapon specs again, Cap. Once it's armed, an enemy would need to blow it and whatever vessel was carrying it back to its component molecules before he could be sure of its not taking out the target and anything within ten miles radius of it, probably."

He looked like a man trapped in nightmare; Joe would have given anything at that moment to have been able to take him into his arms and caress him, telling him in the only way he might have understood it at that precise moment that invention knew no laws but its own, and genius could not bear all the blame for the perverted lengths to which ambition would take it.

He made his voice as gentle as he possibly could. "So, Dex? What do you suggest? A bombing raid to take it out on the ground, before they mount it? What do you reckon, Red?"  
His eyes slid round to LeFauve, who had leant over to peer intently at the map.

"Nasty place," he observed obliquely. "You've got to come in on a narrow front up a steepsided valley, and there's no way out 'cept the same way you came in. And you'll have spotted these?" He pointed at the photograph, to two squat dark shapes Joe guessed would be reinforced concrete bunkers of some sort. "My guess is, they've stashed the weapon in one of those. You'd have to take them both, to make sure. And that target ain't bigger 'n it need be, neither."He looked expressively at the windows against which the wind was still driving snow, and smiled his slow dangerous smile. "Still, they ain't planning on defending against pilots who can see in the dark, neither."

Dex rounded on him, his face ablaze with fury and reproof: even in this infinitely privileged gathering the degree to which Legion planes had been adapted beyond the normal or even what anyone outside the most arcane reaches of MI might think of as the possible was one of their most closely guarded secrets. Joe let it slide; they were all inner circle here, and Dex would come to realise that in a heartbeat, left to himself. And at least it was taking his mind off the pointless soul-searching over how the weapon had come to fall into enemy hands in the first place - something which, in Joe's opinion, was a mess too tangled to expect anyone to unravel: in his private opinion it was at least as much Polly's fault as anyone's, and he shouldn't imagine Polly was paralysed with guilt over the matter, in fact he'd be flabbergasted if she'd even thought twice about it, or made the connection between her actions and the stealing of the plans at all.

For a very brief moment he tried to visualise Polly's expression if he were to set out to explain that his choice as to the bed in which he was proposing to end this evening had been determined as much, perhaps, by that fundamental truth as by any other consideration.

The sight of Charlie's face forcibly deflected his mind from his own personal affairs. It must, Joe thought, be as close as he ever wished to come to hell (and he had been no saint throughout his life to date, and Father Nolan would have been unequivocal about what his current activities were likely to be doing for his chances of a cool and comfortable afterlife) to be in the centre of a gathering on the edge of epic events, and to know that one was fated to take only a civilian's part in them. And when the other civilians around included Chris Sugden and Andrew McAllister, the role a one-legged man had left to him might seem even more restricted -

Helen leant over the plans and emitted what had by now become her trade mark snort. "Oh, honestly! You're all so determined to prove that it's possible for you to fly up a dead-end valley into the teeth of a howling blizzard and blow up a target the size of a dustbin lid at the end of it, that you've never even bothered to ask, any of you, if it's sensible. If it'll actually help. Men!"

There was a hubbub of confused muttering, which she quelled with a single, decisive gesture. Charlie, Joe noted with relief, was so taken at this assault from such an unexpected quarter that he was leaning forwards, his lips parted in a grin, and his eyes alight with amusement.

"I mean, what's this American millionaire going to do if you blow up his shooting lodge? Whatever the people behind this conspiracy might be, they've all got power and influence; they aren't even suspected of anything criminal. You'll all end up in gaol, then they'll just build another weapon and have a go at their leisure, and you won't be able to do a thing to stop them."

There was a murmur of protest.

"And how's this Kansas chappie going to explain away half a dozen fighter planes on his estate, then?" Viscount St George demanded.   
Helen shrugged. "Start of an air museum? Props for a Hollywood movie he's backing? Hush-hush defence contracting stuff? That's not the point. He's not the one who'll be asked to explain anything. Unless you catch this crew red-handed, you're sunk."

She sat back in her chair, as one who has said all she had to say, and doesn't expect to be listened to. There was a faintly stunned silence.

"It would seem the lassie's in the right of it," MacAllister observed. 

Dex nodded. "I agree. And that's why - when Red produced that photograph - I did some figuring on my own account. And here's what I came up with."

He pushed aside the Ordnance survey maps, and pulled out a sheaf of drawings with figures on them: velocities, specifications, tolerances. 

They had had all yesterday evening to talk about the problem, after all, and Joe had been deciphering Dex's scribbled strokes of genius for a very long time. While the others were still craning their necks to see better, or simply looking baffled, Joe knew exactly what Dex had planned.

Fear caught him in the entrails, and his mouth was suddenly dry, as though he had swallowed ashes. He looked across the table, at Dex's white, set face; the lines etched around his eyes by needless shame and guilt, and raged inwardly. No hope of deflecting him once he had made his mind up; the integrity he had been reflecting on a split second earlier as so fundamental to Dex's essence would enshrine his resolve in granite once he was convinced his plan was the right thing to do, and that the personal risk it entailed for Dex himself was only a fitting expiation for his guilt in bringing about the situation in the first place.

And he was right, too, a small part of Joe's brain insisted on reminding him: all the other avenues of strategic thought which he had considered since LeFauve had come back with the photograph had ended in dead-ends. Helen's objection to their destroying the weapon on the ground had merely echoed his own misgivings. And he had, he had to confess, vaguely toyed with an idea akin to Dex's, but without, he realised now, fully thinking through how he could account for six enemy aces without Franky flying wingman for him, and still put himself in the right place at the right time to disable the weapon before it arrived at Balmoral.

Dex's plan, desperate as it was, carried the same unassuming stamp of pure genius that he brought to everything else he attempted. Slender as the chance might seem, it was a real one. Just one which for the first time in their long friendship placed Dex unquestionably in the position of maximum danger from the outset.

And that was the point at which he baulked.

Joe knew that if he vetoed the idea - as it was within his power to do - as he desperately wanted to - he would be ranking the fate of millions as less worth than his own feelings. 

 

"So what? Haven't you done enough over the years to earn a break?" a voice whispered in his ear.  
There seemed like an infinity of time during which he paused on the brink. And then he heard another voice, answering the first, "And you think Dex would see it that way? So who wins if you sell your soul and lose him anyway, because you're not the man he thought you were?"

There was a bleak relief in the truth of that reflection; he had, after all, no real choice. He made his voice coldly official.

"That has to be the single most hare-brained, reckless suggestion I've ever heard in all my time in the Legion."

Dex's head was cocked up at an angle; as though he had been listening intently. But he knew, too, what he had not heard. His lips curled in a smile; his eyes slid sidelong towards Joe. "Not from where I've been sitting all that time, Cap."

LeFauve threw his head back and guffawed, and the others in the room, still several steps behind, caught the sudden release of tension, and started to relax. Only Charlie - who had heard the particular exhilaration that comes with knowing one is committed to staking one's all on the gods and the morrow - still looked grim. 

Joe tried to flatten any bitterness out of his voice. "Well, Dex, as the genius who thought up this plan, why don't you brief everyone on what they have to do to carry it out? I wouldn't want anyone to be under any illusions what we are asking of them."

Dex's glance at him had been a covert plea for support as well as anything else. The "we" had reassured him, Joe could tell. He cleared his throat, got to his feet, and made a grab for the sheaf of notes.

"Well," he said, "they chose helium not hydrogen for the buoyancy, and they'd got good strategic reasons for that, obviously. But what they may not have realised is that by choosing helium they've left us with a strategic avenue of attack that wouldn't otherwise be available. And fortunately, I understand Mr Shuttleworth is able to put an airship at our disposal, which is something, again, they won't be anticipating. So here's what I suggest -"

And Dex, his voice growing in confidence, outlined the plan in the candlelit dining room, and Joe watched the shadowy faces learn, at last, the sheer magnitude of the effort which would be expected of them if the civiisations and decencies symbolised by the Palladian elegances around were not to perish and go down forever into the dark.


	2. On the eve of battle, Joe and Dex find that they don't know as much about each other as they thought they did

The touch was feather-light, as always. Nevertheless - as always - he flinched aside from that particular intimacy. Joe was close against him, his body curved around his, his breath soft against his cheek. Everything he had ever dreamed of. 

Except that, even if asked, even if begged with love, he had at last realised at much cost there was a barrier that it would cost too much to surrender. Tonight he had expected things would be different. He had assumed if asked in this particular case - with love - his inner resistance would crumble. 

In the last analysis, it transpired he had been wrong about that.

Always before Joe had taken the hint. Tonight - yes Dex should have known that tonight might be different.

They would both face the unshielded face of death on the morrow, in its separate guises.

It was not unreasonable that Joe would ask more that he had ever sought before. 

_Eat and drink for tomorrow you die  
Eat, drink and - yes, well. _

"Don't do that," Dex said, perhaps a little more irritably than he in truth meant. After all, tomorrow - was tomorrow. They might both be cold and dead and the sun might be setting over - that Empire upon which the sun never set. What did a little discomfort matter? But it wasn't - wholly - a physical resistance.

"Do what?" The finger's pressure was yet more intrusive. He could let matters progress - even, he knew, get pleasure from how events would turn out if he did. But at a price he was not minded to pay.

"That. Joe - look - don't -"

Momentarily the touch ceased. He knew too much to expect that was all. 

"Did that bastard hurt you?"

Joe's tone changed. Dex had never heard anything before like the sound of flat murderous hatred which infused his lover's voice. To gain time he temporised.

"Who?"

Quibbling - as he should have known - was futile. Joe's voice was low and savage. "You know perfectly well who I mean. Did he hurt you?"

There was something he could have said, and it would have been perfectly true, too.

His first lover - and that description of the man, in itself, was bitterly ironic - had hurt him profoundly; in spirit, honour, self-respect; in anything that was worth anything. But he had, Dex thought drearily, been competent and moderately considerate as far as the physical side of things went. It was not precisely fair not to give a strictly honest answer to Joe's question. And the man was dead, too.

 

"Not really," he answered. Joe caught him fiercely and turned him over towards him in the bed.

"Tell me".

He shrugged again. "No. Look, Joe , don't. Please."

Joe turned even further towards him, unexpectedly blinking back tears - there was no other way to interpret the shine on Joe's eyes in the light of the bedside lamp.

"Dex, I'm sorry. I just want to make you happy. Truly. There's no way I'd ask you to do anything you wouldn't want. I just wondered -"

Joe's arms stretched out to surround him; he wanted to snuggle in and be lost there forever. But the echoes of a failure - of a cowardly flinching - got between him and that so-feasible, so-accessible bliss.

"Leave me alone. Look, just go. OK? I'm who I am, and you - you deserve better, OK?"

He swung his legs to the floor; Joe turned to him, grabbing frantically at him, fighting off his resistance. The struggle was long and far from bloodless - the lamp was knocked flying and expired in a bang and a shower of blue sparks on the floor; it was a wonder no-one came running to find out who was attacking. Eventually, Joe had had to resort to wrestling him down and then lying half on top of him amid a heap of sheets and pillows.

"Look, you idiot," Joe breathed half an inch from his face, holding his wrists spread wide apart, his knees pinning down Dex's thighs, "you're the best there is. I've never wanted anything but the best, and now I've got it. OK?"

Dex shrugged helplessly. From where he was positioned, Joe could decipher one level of acceptance of his proposition for himself. If he couldn't see that there were others - 

He could, it seemed. Abruptly the warm weight had vanished. In the tense night there was, momentarily, a waiting stillness. And then the note in Joe's voice - previously so strained - changed to something lighter, amused; rather the tone in which a man, who has struggled in vain at a recalcitrant door for some time, finally notes that the handle is marked "push" and not "pull", and upbraids himself for his own stupidity.

"I don't have anything to prove with you, you know, Dex. Did you think I did? "

He pulled him into a long, leisurely, exploring kiss. His lips were barely an inch from his face when he spoke again. "When I said I wanted to do anything that would make you happy, anything was exactly what I meant. Does that change things, hm?"

And this time the direction of his guiding hands left no room to doubt his intention.

"Oh, yes," Dex breathed. From out of the darkness came a small sound of satisfaction. And anticipation.


	3. The speeding pace of events at least brings some good luck to someone

It was 16.36 in the RCMP's provincial head offices in Fredricton, New Brunswick. The Mountie officer had been sitting in the outer office for nearly an hour when the harsh sound of the buzzer and the brief nod from the dragon behind the desk told him that he was finally permitted to enter the inner sanctum. 

The Chief Superintendent did not look up as Petersen entered. Nor was he acknowledged by more than a non-committal grunt. But - he allowed himself a glimmer of hope, as ruthlessly tamped down. The dossier was spread over the blotter, and as he entered the Chief Superintendent was turning over the unfinished letter to the Psychical Research Society (odd, Petersen had thought when his highly irregular rummage through McMurtry's files had turned that up: perhaps ultimately something in the Super's make-up - the legacy of having once been a good cop - had prevented him from destroying that key piece of evidence).

The Chief Superintendent gestured him to a chair. After a period of silence - Petersen could hardly have told if it was ten minutes or three hours - he spoke.

"So you've definitely linked the Fraser woman to the American journalist's kidnapping?"

Petersen nodded. "Sir." A hand gesture invited him to expand on that.

"Hair and fingerprints from the vehicle registered in her name, sir. You'll find the lab records complete. It gave me enough grounds to interrogate the chauffeur. You'll find his confession -"

"I've read it. A remarkably - frank - document. And far-reaching." For the first time the Chief Superintendent raised his head. "I notice that throughout this - very thorough and productive - investigation - you make no reference to your commanding officer."

There was nothing he could think of to say to that. He braced himself back against his chair and murmured woodenly, "Sir."

The Chief Superintendent's expression softened slightly. "I'd heard rumours before. Not enough to act on - at least, so I thought. I hoped it wasn't true - and I kept on hoping. Too bad I got it wrong. But thank God for the Force someone didn't."

Petersen's head shot up. The Chief Superintendent hit the buzzer on his desk; the dragon of the outer office came in.

"Get me a call to Ottawa," he said crisply. "Priority."

She nodded, and retreated. The Chief Superintendent looked fully at Petersen for the first time. "You know the rules for an internal investigation, Petersen. I'm not planning to second guess Ottawa, but you can assume MacMurtry will be suspended on full pay until the investigation's over."

Petersen nodded again, wordlessly. The weight that he had carried for so many months was being lifted, and yet he had been so bent under it that it did not feel, as yet, as though his back had been relieved of the burden. 

The Chief Superintendent smiled slightly. "And - equally in accordance with protocol - I'm assigning you to detached duty, away from the station. I hope you packed an overnight bag before you came up here." He looked at his watch. "I sent word, before you came in, for them to hold the last flight down to New York for you. I take it you'd want to be the one to finish what you started?"

He pushed a package of papers across the blotter to him; travel warrants, the green crispness of new US dollar bills, and, beneath them all, a thick cream-coloured form, embossed with more seals than Petersen had ever seen in one place before, but which, nevertheless, he recognised instantly.

There were ways he had rehearsed this interview, in the sleepless hours and the long watches of the night. There were speeches he had written in his head, to befit this very moment.

But in the end all he did was gather the packet, somewhat clumsily, off the desk in front of him, rise to his feet, and salute.

"Sir," Petersen said.


	4. Storm clouds gather as the clock counts down

According to ship's time it was just after four bells of the Morning Watch; according to "local" time (if the concept had any meaning out here a few thousand feet above the faceless grey heaving mass of the wintry North Atlantic) it was 06.02; according to the chronometer in the Captain's cabin which dutifully showed GMT for the purposes of log keeping and sundry other official purposes, it was two minutes past eight in the morning, and according to the Captain herself it was the wrong bloody time, they were in the wrong bloody place and the Albion's bow was pointed in the wrong bloody direction.

Also, the bloody signals lieutenant was late. Briefly Franky revelled in the angry anticipation of knowing that whenever the lazy young sod choose to show his miserable pimpled face there would undoubtedly be at least one person on board the Albion who regretted being where he was even more than she did -

At last!

There was the knock on her cabin door she had been expecting for the last five minutes; Foulkes, the more reasonable part of her brain acknowledged even while she girded her loins for the righteous vengeance she was preparing for the evildoer, had in the past erred more on the side of irritating earliness.

She pitched her voice at a carefully-modulated official snarl. "Come in!"

Her head was bent over the pile of Captain's Reports, orders and sundry official paperwork which was her daily portion. She did not look up as her errant Scratcher entered: an intimidating trick she'd learnt from her first ever skipper, a hard-bitten veteran who'd served in _HMS Dreadnought_ (the gunroom claimed it had been the _Agamemnon_ ) and who frequently asserted that women, grand pianos and Pekinese spaniels were equally useless at sea.

It was the echo of his step which - too late - gave her the clue. Foulkes had never let his boot fall on her cabin sole with so decisive a tread. Franky's head jerked up - and into the muzzle of an automatic pistol.

"Hands on the table," Lieutenant-Commander Ferguson said, a slow, gloating enjoyment alive in his face. "You are relieved of command. Consider yourself confined to your cabin until further orders. Oh - for your information. We have already secured your co-conspirator. Surgeon-Commander Davies has been apprehended. We aren't quite sure if he was shot resisting arrest or not. Your cooperation over the next few minutes could be quite important in clarifying our thoughts on that point."

There was no point in saying anything. She raged, briefly, inwardly, and then went through a suitable pantomime of acquiescence. Hatred hotter than a thousand fiery suns burned within her, not just for Ferguson but for all he represented. That could wait.

Survive - regroup - counter-attack.

The words of an old poem - learned in the nursery but never, she thought, fully appreciated until now - began to run through her head.  
 _When the Himalayan peasant meets the he-bear in his pride -_

\----

It was 08.03 on the morning of 23 December, and on Royal Deeside the sun would not rise for another three-quarters of an hour.

_PC McDonald was proceeding on his rounds from Crathes village along the perimeters of the Balmoral estate when he apprehended an intruder -_

The official words into which his inevitable report was, at some later period in the day, destined to be transmuted dissolved in the face of the facts into a wholly human sense of aggravation. 

Someone was in the very act of shinning the wall into the Royal purlieus.

McDonald leapt from his bicycle and ran towards the dim shape he could just distinguish on the crest of the wall, blowing his whistle as he went. He knew there had been autograph hunters and fanatics before - heaven help us, during the Great Crisis a couple of years ago there had even been journalists - but nevertheless this was an appalling transgression of the proper order of things: something McDonald had always classed - and would class, while there was breath left in his body - as one of the Things That Mustn't Be.

The intruder dropped from the wall, and turned to face McDonald as he came puffing up. 

"Now then, laddie, that's no way to -"

The knife was in and out so quickly McDonald never saw it. It would be a day and a half before anyone thought to look for his body. By which time the world had changed.

And that was the first death of the morning.

\----

Half an hour later and half an ocean away Mr Midshipman Ives was enduring the mockery of his coevals over breakfast, and plotting, like Lear, such revenges which, though he knew not what they might be at the present time, would, when delivered, prove the terrors of the earth.

Love and a cough, he had read once during his casual brush with what the world regarded as education, cannot be hid. He had noted that pronouncement with the bland scepticism with which he had greeted any other attempt to confine his behaviour by the pressures of law, morality, public opinion or confiscating his chocolate supplies.  
But this time, it seemed, he had miscalculated. He might be the skylarker _par non_ aboard the _Albion_ ; he might have a ready tongue, a forceful right hand and comfortable independent means; enough to ensure that if the Royal Navy chose to dispense with his services - by no means an unlikely outcome - he would not be reduced to playing the fiddle outside the local Palais de Dance in order to earn an honest crust.

But he had not reckoned on the fact that he was - for the first time in the whole of his seventeen previous years of existence – in love. Helplessly, hopelessly In Love. Certainly hopelessly: he might be besotted, but he was far from stupid; he had calculated the odds over the dark watches of the night and he knew that his inamorata no doubt only distinguished between him and a ship's rat on the basis that the rat's conspicuous departure from the vessel might damage morale. 

He had tried fighting it. He had even tried sublimating it, along the lines of helpful advice offered by an elderly crumbling volume borrowed from his uncle's library, in which the Rev Elias Peppercorn had devoted chapter upon chapter to The Moral Rocks On Which A Young Chap May Wreck Himself.

He could only assume that the Rev Elias Peppercorn had never spent months at sea under (and God forgive him for the expression and all the visions it conjured up!) Commander Francesca Cook, DSO and bar.

"So what are you doing, Ives,?" Gilchrist demanded. 

"Another demmed thick book, always scribble, scribble eh, Mr Ives?" Vernon commented, managing by dint of a deft wriggle to capture the penny exercise book and hold it aloft out of Ives's reach as a trophy of war.

"Hey, give me that back, it's private," Ives protested, making a futile snatch.

"Why? What deep dark secrets do you have, if you can't share them with your brother officers? Let it all out, Ivesy: confession's good for the soul. You'd know that if you'd ever been a Buchmanite."

Ives, on the point of retrieving his belongs by outright frontal attack, suddenly caught the eye of the Senior Officer of the watch on them, surveying them coldly from the other side of the messroom, and desisted. Justice, when it emanated from that particular quarter, was, in Ives's extensive experience, swift, and wholly untempered with mercy.

It was too late, anyway; Vernon had stuck his big nose into the exercise book, and any moment now -

"Chaps!" Vernon crowed. "Ivesy's writing poems! To his lady love!"

A chorus of witticisms broke out around him.

"Ivesy! You devil! Who is she?"

"Top totty, if this is anything to go by - ooh, this is hot stuff - "

"That proves it - it isn't always the quiet ones that are the worst -"

Ives gritted his teeth, and prayed, hard for a surprise attack in the next two seconds by an overwhelmingly superior force. Vernon was flicking through the execise book in an effort to find the identity of the woman concerned - briefly, Ives felt enhanced respect for that Shakespeare chap - call her the Dark Lady and people would still be trying to guess who she was three hundred years later - and it would have solved the problem of trying to find a rhyme for Francesca, too -

Vernon's expression mingled unholy glee with incredulity - he must have got to poem ten, then -

"Chaps! This is priceless! Ten million pounds to one you don't guess who she is!" And he collapsed onto the cabin sole in a paroxysm of pantomimed mirth.

Ives collared the exercise book and got to his feet with a parody of dignity. 

"I shall take myself somewhere where the company is capable of appreciating the finer things in life, and where a fellow's innermost feelings are treated with a semblance of respect," he announced, and beat a swift retreat from the messroom. Behind him he heard Gilchrist roar, "The Old Lady? Tell me you're having us on, Verners?"

Fortunately, he got out before the tide of red washing over his face betrayed how much he felt about the disaster. It was only a matter of time, though; his guts writhed inwardly. With Vernon and Gilchrist shooting off their mouths, and old Rodney in earshot too - and anyway, popular rumour had it that the Old Lady knew everything that happened aboard her ship, usually before it had.

Half way down the corridor Ives was seized with the sort of brilliant inspiration which simply couldn't not be acted on. It mattered not a jot that the half-dozen or so times before when he'd been afflicted by a similar inspiration had all ended in interviews with Higher Authority of greater or less painfulness.

Given the Old Lady was bound to find out in short order, why not make a virtue of necessity and present her with a selection of the best of his work, hand-calligraphed? He had the best part of two hours before he was required to be on watch, and she - he knew her schedule better than he knew his own - would undoubtedly be on the bridge at this hour. He could write out his personal favourite poem, and leave it in her cabin for her to find. Of course, her cabin door would be locked, but Ives was a man of considerable resource and ingenuity. Furthermore, his last course aboard the _Albion_ had been maintenance, technical and structural, and he'd found it deeply fascinating. In fact, he prided himself that he now knew more about the _Albion'_ s infrastructure than her own designers did -

Whistling an air from _Pinafore_ Mr Midshipman Ives made tracks towards his own cabin.


	5. The count-down continues

A thin wintry sun had just risen over an airfield slightly to the North of Glasgow, and a man stood by his plane as the mechanics - Shuttleworths' finest, they'd done him proud throughout this project - ran through a final series of exhaustive tests. It was a pity, of course, that he hadn't had the chance to test out the modified rudder bar on a couple more trial flights, but that couldn't be helped, and deep down he knew that he was as ready as he was ever going to be; as ready, actually, as he'd ever been in his entire career.

He watched while the w/t apparatus was duly set to the correct frequencies, and then ran through the recognition codes Dex had slipped him after dinner. Absurd, really, this cloak and dagger business, but necessary - look at how Joe had reacted to Dex's announcement that he was proposing to take the lead role in the boarding party who would seek to disable the weapon in flight; he'd almost looked as though he wanted to veto Dex's involvement altogether, although Dex not only was the only man who could possibly pull off this insane plan but had a full complement of functioning limbs and was combat fit, to the Legion's exacting standards, to boot -

A thought struck him and he cursed, softly, under his breath. There was one thing he had overlooked, after all. He felt in his pockets for his fountain pen.  
There was no point being other than realistic about this. The three of them - even if Joe thought it was only him and LeFauve - were up against six aces, judging by the list provided by that American woman (and thank God she seemed to have dropped out of the picture as far as Joe was concerned; in the nearly ten years Charles had had of acting as a silent spectator to the succession of emotional car crashes that had represented his friend's romantic life she'd been quite the most spectacular pile-up to date, and that wasn't just because if they'd had the benefit of Joe's plane covering the retreat from Nanjing he might still have had both his legs). OK; most of those aces were of his own vintage, and flying was a young man's game, but it was only sensible to take precautions. He'd sent a letter to Piglet, of course, last night, and neither she nor Stinko were the types to be grasping about matters like this, but between Aunt Catherine's over-assertiveness, and Helen's undue diffidence it would be as well to have everything legally cut and dried.

He found a pad on one of the mechanics' clip-boards, and tore off a page. The lawyer chappies would wrap this in their own special brand of verbiage, of course, but he thought he could remember enough of the gist to make it work.

When there was a suitable break in the testing procedures he summoned a couple of the mechanics over. 

"I've got to send something to my lawyer in a hurry," he said. "Would you two chaps mind witnessing my signature? Just a formality."

He had picked the younger ones, who had not gone through what he still thought of as "the Great War". They signed, without realising the significance of the fact he had asked for two of them. He folded the paper and noted on the outside of the fold the name and address of the Cook family solicitors, a firm of intense respectability somewhere near Lincoln's Inn. Someone would undoubtedly make sure it was forwarded, should need arise.

That matter settled, Charlie Cook then turned his full attention back towards the mechanics and how they were preparing his 'plane.

\----

Dark was lifting at last in these Northern latitudes; a cold clear dawn sweeping in from the east. The 'plane that had been ghosting around at will in the gloaming suddenly found itself having to take thought for its own vulnerability. 

It made one last pass over the house, the noise of its engines blown away and lost on the ten knot breeze, and transmitted a quick, coded burst.

_Today. Confirmed._

And then the pre-arranged signal group which was not just coded but in Ancient Greek to boot:

_Wreathed is the bull for the sacrifice, and the slayer too stands ready._

\----

Ives had, as earlier noted, assumed he would find the Old Lady's cabin empty at that hour. When, after an excruicatingly cramped few minutes wriggling down the ventilation duct he found himself looking out through the light metal grille at - his skipper, her hands stretched out above her head, handcuffed to a pipe on the bulkhead behind her the sight discombobulated him totally. A gag which appeared to have been improvised from a face flannel blocked her mouth, and - he winced at the sight, while loving her all the more for the snarling unconscionable arrogance she bore through it all - they had taken off her eye patch, so the ruin of that side of her face was exposed to anyone who might see.

His shocked gasp must have been audible, he supposed. Certainly her good eye moved from its previous stoic fixation on the ceiling, and moved, evidently seeking to find the source of the sound. She fixed on the ventilation grille, evidently having reached her own conclusions, and signalled frantically with an eyebrow.

There was nothing for it. Four quick passes with the screwdriver he had prudently pocketed at the start of this mad endeavour and he was standing on the sole of his captain's cabin.

His first action was to rip the gag off. She nodded with - he felt a sweep of pleasure - approval.

"Desk. Top drawer," she said abruptly. "Kick it first. And then press hard - twice - on the key-hole."

Much to his surprise, the drawer yielded to this treatment, shooting out twice as far as he had expected, and disgorging a weapon which, frankly, looked more like something from a comic book. She had seen his stare of unbelief. Her lips curled.

"Non-regulation, natch. Birthday present. From a friend of mine. And it can burn through battle hardened steel." She raised her wrists and rattled her chains at him. "Don't be clumsy. Please."

The strange weapon did everything it said on the tin. His arms and wrists felt strangely weak when he had finished, and his skipper was sitting up on the bed, massaging her wrists and looking intently at him through her one good eye.

"Well,"she said eventually, "is that a known bug in the system?"

"Wha -?"

She gestured impatiently at the wreckage of the ventilation shaft out of which he had emerged. In an instant various realisations coalesced.

_She wants to know if I've made a habit of spying on her in her private quarters._  
What a disgusting notion.  
I wonder why it didn't occur to me before? 

Uneasily conscious that his thought processes might be transparent to that intent, one-eyed scrutiny (she'd found a spare eye patch from somewhere, returning her face to its normal severely official guise) Ives gulped.

"N-not so far as I'm aware. Ma'am. I mean, this is the fi - the only time I've used it, and I think I'm the only one who - and I haven't said anything -"

"A lout, but a trainable lout," she observed to no-one in particular, and then turned towards him, exhibiting a smile so dazzling Ives turned weak at the knees.

"Mr Midshipman Ives. Recall to me what I last told you, on the last occasion we had the pleasure of meeting."

Ives winced. He rather hoped she had forgotten.

"Um - you - ah - said that -"

He gulped. His skipper's smile was wide and inviting. He tried but failed not to remember the couplet about "And welcomes little fishes in/With gently smiling jaws."

With a rush he said, "You said, that if I ever brought off anything like that again aboard any ship you were in command of you'd personally castrate me with your bare hands, chop me up in little bits and feed me slowly to the sharks. Or crocodiles. Depending on latitude. Ma'am."

He waited. Her smile became broader but, somehow, no less threatening.

"And so I did. Hm."

Her remaining eye narrowed to a bright sharp point.

"Consider that order rescinded, Ives."

That rocked him back on his heels, She smiled in the teeth of his discomfiture.

"By six bells I would like this vessel to be in a state of anarchy. Do what you like to bring that about, Ives; short of scuttling the _Albion_ or murdering Lieutenant-Commander Ferguson."

The specific nature of this prohibition was baffling, and the implications horrifying - did the Old Lady really intend to give him _carte blanche_ to assassinate anyone else he choose in the entire ship's company? He coughed.

"Ma'am? You said - ah - not Lieutenant-Commander Ferguson?"

Her smile was by now downright disconcerting. "Indeed. I'd hate you to deprive me of that particular pleasure - Although, now I come to think of it, it would suit me if you could render the Lieutenant-Commander in urgent need of medical attention some time in the next fifteen minutes. I could organise a search party over the ship to find out where they've hidden Alan, but it'd be simpler if they led me to him. If you get into Sick Bay Stores, Ives, you'll find a demi-john marked "Mal. Malefic." Third shelf, half way along. It's Alan's patent remedy to deter malingerers. A good dollop of that in Ferguson's tea, and - we shall see what we shall see."

Ives gulped again. "Ma'am -? Permission to clarify? You - um - you're ordering me to poison a senior officer?"

Her face, now, was wholly serious. "If I'd got a better idea of who else he'd dragged into his mutinous little schemes I'd order you to poison a lot more than one senior officer. Let's see now - who are his cronies in the ward room? Rawson, Adams, Moore, Phelps, Dawkins and Sturmer-Smythe. Dose the lot of them, Ives. God will know her own. Oh, and while you're at it, don't forget Gibbs."

"Gibbs?" His incredulity was naked on his face; surely the Old Lady couldn't suspect the painfully earnest Chief Maintenance Officer of involvement in a mutiny?

Her face showed a flicker of regret. "Well, I daresay you're right. It was just that he would tell that story about the vicar and the donkey cart again at dinner last night, when I'd promised myself I wouldn't be responsible for my actions if he did. Also, he should have been the one to work out the potential offensive and defensive possibilities of those ventilation ducts, without waiting for an idiot wart to blunder into it - Still, you're quite right, Ives. No way to treat a loyal officer. Belay the order so far as it concerns Gibbs."

Ives nodded, his mind racing. The Captain's word was law aboard ship, of course, but could the concept of lawful order really be extended to administering noxious substances to half the wardroom?

She, clearly, was in no doubt about it, moving on to the next stage in the plan.

"I expect you to extend your talents to the utmost. Recruit whomever you like. Someone, Ives- " she stalked across the cabin and retrieved a set of keys from a remote drawer, brandishing them as though they had been a revolver. "Someone wants to do this to England. And we're going to stop him - oh yes, we are. But before we do, let him have a taste of his own medicine. Disorder, was it? I'll show him disorder!"

There was only one thing to do. Ives nodded fervently and murmured, "Yes, _Ma'am_!"

Having collected one or two other oddments from drawers about the cabin, - including, Ives noted with some alarm, a gasmask - she strolled casually over to the door, and shot the bolt on the inner side of it.

"We'll leave the way you arrived, Ives. We won't be able to leave the ventilation shaft looking exactly as it should, but it should baffle them for a bit where I've got to."

She caught the edge of the ducting and pulled herself up into the shaft in one long athletic movement. Ives felt momentarily dizzy. A voice, slightly muffled by the pipework, said impatiently, "Well? What are you waiting for, man?"

It was only when they emerged at the far end of the shaft that he felt brave enough to put into words what he had been thinking.

"Ma'am? You do know that they'd court-martial you for this, don't you?"

She turned to face him, the light of battle glowing in her one good eye. "Well, I sincerely hope so."

He must have gaped, inelegantly, because she tapped him firmly on the shoulder.

"A severely practical institution, the Royal Navy. However much provocation one may have given them, they don't waste time court-martialling corpses."

He was still letting that sink in when she smiled that dazzling smile again. "Still, if you can't take a joke you shouldn't have joined, eh? Up, Ives, and at 'em!"


	6. Of partridges and sewers

It was half past nine in the morning, and King George VI, Emperor of India, Defender of the Faith, was just finishing his breakfast and meditating on partridges and sewers.

The failure of the latter had come between him and his ordinary late-December pursuit of the former, and he'd been disposed to resent that at first, but actually there'd been compensations to being at Balmoral at this unfamiliar time of year, away from the midges of high summer and the wild winds of Autumn. 

Take today: the snows of the day before yesterday lay pristine and beautiful upon the high tops under a tranquil pale blue sky - the brief ghost of a crescent moon was still visible on the western horizon - and the clear fresh air of the Highlands blew through the open casement (and, he had to admit, through various random door-frames and window-seatings. His great-grandmother had had a sure eye for the picturesque, but put up with much when it came to lack of comfort in domestic architecture).

Walking, whether on the edges of the hillside or even just in the park, would today have a finished perfection that made a man glory in being alive.

He speared another morsel of cold grouse (which was either just on the turn or richly gamey, according to viewpoint) and was aware of Wentworth hovering in the doorway. He gestured vigorously with the tines of his fork.

"Come in, man, don't stand there dithering!"

Wentworth obeyed, ducking his head in a brief, awkward sketch of a bow: the King wondered if he would ever achieve the relaxed ease of his predecessor.

"I'm sorry, sir, but there's a priority call. From the Admiralty. If your Majesty would care -"

The equerry might be an idiot, but he wasn't a blithering idiot. If he thought something required the Royal attention before he had even finished his breakfast then it would almost certainly be worth his attention. Nor did their Lords of the Admiralty trouble his holiday repose for anything routine. He nodded.

"I'll take it."

Even the buzz of static on the line sounded urgent. He listened for some moments.

"What? One of the Fortress class? A mutiny? No coherent signals? Broken out of the exercise group and heading East with no explanation? Yes of course you may -"

Abruptly, the line went dead. He shook the handset and rattled the receiver impatiently for a few moments. There was no response.

Wentworth, his face the colour of fortnight-old milk, craned his head into the room. "Sir? The milk delivery boy appears to be lying dead in the shrubbery, sir. And no-one has heard from Peterson since he went down towards the village with the post-bag, an hour and a half ago. Sir."

Long - very long ago now - he had bathed with the Tsarina and her Princesses, his cousins, off Osborne Bay, daring them to venture into the chilly, yeasty surf of Spithead. And, still long ago but as vividly as yesterday he had heard the news of their deaths at the hands of an outraged people. Today, perhaps, it had come to him. 

He nodded his head with a grave briskness. If it must, it must.

At such times one's words, he knew, would inevitably be recorded by someone and echo down the years to come.

"Well then," the King said, cold will overwhelming the natural hesitation in his speech on such an occasion, "it would seem we may be under siege. I suggest you go to the gun-room and dish out the weapons and ammunition all round. And, as you have to pass the kitchens on your way down: my compliments to Mrs McBeeton, and please let her know that the ham was excellent as always, but I doubt the cold game will bear another outing."

Wentworth nodded and withdrew.


	7. Dex's plan is revealed - and perhaps improved upon - as time ticks towards zero hour

The backbreaking work of loading the bags of gas was over. The airship wobbled on its mooring ropes in the light breeze, fully inflated and faintly obscene against the backdrop of the Palladian mansion behind. From a remote church, somewhere over in the hidden village behind the house, the clock striking the quarter before ten sounded.  
Dex moistened his lips.

"Right," he said. "You all understand what we have to do here?"

The four men before him nodded; Viscount St George, who seemed in some way to have appointed himself leader of the desperate little band, waved an airy hand in an expansive gesture. "Of course. Once the defending fighters have been eliminated, Shutters' airship matches velocities with the attacking ship, the assault party as lowered down onto the top of the airship using Shutters' patented harness attachment - as modified -" he flicked a graceful nod towards Paul Shuttleworth, who was standing a little apart from the group, looking pale.

"We cut our way through the outer skin of the airframe - climb down between the struts and the airbags - fortunately for us, not being at so much risk of explosions at close quarters in this particular case as we might otherwise be - break into the nacelle through the maintenance hatch - overpower any guards there may be - and allow you, Dearborn, to disarm your weapon. Simple."

One of the young men visibly gulped, and Viscount St George allowed his gaze to linger on him for a second. 

"You had a question, Andrews?" he enquired gently. The man - he had a prominent Adam's apple and the acne-marked skin of late adolescence, Dex noted - shook his head. The four had been recruited at the shortest of short notice. Viscount St George had answered for his two friends from the Oxford University Alpine Climbing Association, and Chris Sugden had produced the others, who - apart from their impeccable Communist credentials - were, it seemed, a pair of rock-climbers of some repute who financed their hobby by working as much overtime in the shipyards of Barrow-in-Furness as they could manage during the off-season. Joe and LeFauve had ferried them in overnight, after much frantic telephoning and telegramming, and unexpectedly all four of the climbers had turned out to know each other by repute, to be delighted to have this opportunity to foregather and almost had to be forced apart with crowbars to prevent their talking technical climbing shop.

"Reckon that anyone who tries to stop us will know they're badly mistaken," Greenwood, one of the Barrow two, said with a certain amount of satisfaction.

Viscount St George nodded. "I reckon you reckon right, comrade. Or should I say 'left'? Anyway. Consider the assault team assembled, Dearborn. All present and correct."

here was a faint cough.

"Not quite," Paul Shuttleworth said, and stepped forwards.

Five pairs of eyes turned to gaze on him, and he flushed. Nevertheless, his voice was perfectly steady.

"I'm coming with you," he said. "The blimp's crew know perfectly well what they have to do without my directing them, and -" his look focussed directly on Dex - "We don't know what opposition we're going to meet. And that machine has to be disarmed. Come what may. And none of the others have a prayer of knowing how."

Viscount St George looked at his friend. "Shutters, are you quite insane? Your father will kill me if you -"

Shuttleworth shrugged, a gesture which gave him unconscious authority. "And the Duke of Denver won't kill me if you don't come back? We're both of us sole heirs, Jerry. Besides, don't forget, I've already been disowned. Unlike you." He turned towards Dex, who had been expecting the appeal and been fighting uselessly against its inherent logic for some seconds now. "Surely you have to see this, sir? We can't afford to run a mission like this without redundancy built in. After all, the first law of engineering design is -"

"Fail to safe," Dex said, completing the sentence. There was a chorus of remonstrance from around him, which he ignored. The severe logic of the boy's position was, when push came to shove, unarguable. Instead, he nodded, gravely, and held out his hand. "You're quite right, Shuttleworth. Get yourself a parachute pack, and find yourself fatigues and boots. We plan to be airborne in ten minutes."

Shuttleworth's hand gripped his; hard, but perhaps a little too firmly, to suppress a tremor. He looked straight into the kid's eyes, trying to infuse him with that spirit of adventure that Joe managed to distil so effortlessly in such circumstances.

"Welcome aboard, Mr Shuttleworth. It will be a privilege serving with you."


	8. Developments are happening on the Western side of the Pond, also....

On Broadway it was shortly after five in the morning and the neon lights were still blazing, though all except the most determined of the late revellers were flagging. 

The taxi debouched three people onto the sidewalk outside the little club in a side-street. The doorman summed them up through the spyhole with a practised eye. There was something just a little too clean-cut and sober about the two men: something which on a subliminal level suggested unwelcome officialdom. His hand moved towards the alarm button which would warn the patrons in the cellar below of an impending raid. But then the girl with them turned, shrugging off the wrap which had been swathed high around her face and neck against the chill of the small hours, and favoured the blank expanse of the door with her most dazzling smile, as though she could see straight through to where he was sitting.

Relief flooding him, he released the catch on the door and the three new arrivals stumbled through into the smoky dark of the club entrance.

"Miz Perkins!" 

"Sam, it's great to see you again." 

The _Chronicle_ reporter gestured to her friends. "I couldn't let my friends from out of town leave without experiencing a real old fashioned night on the town, now could I?"  
One of the two men smiled; he had a soft British accent.

"And an experience it's been. Between Jix, Dora and Mrs Grundy we aren't accustomed to this sort of thing back home."

Sam returned the smile; he was used to overseas visitors expressing similar sentiments. He stood back to let them pass down the stairs.

It had been a long night, and dawn was, as yet, far off here in New York, though Kitty O'Farrell rejoiced that bloody morning was already far advanced in the land on whose soil she had vowed never again to set foot - at least not before certain conditions might be fulfilled.

She took care lest the fierce exultation she was feeling show in her face: the little man with the pince-nez (whose expression could, at times, chill even her) had the capacity to understand, but would note it down as a weakness nonetheless and use it when he saw fit. And as for sharing her inner thoughts with the blowsy Mid-Westerner, with her air of fake sophistication, like Chanel perfume atomised onto unwashed flesh -

Conscious of the need to maintain the illusion of harmony between her and her co-conspirators Miss Kitty O'Farrell laughed her sweetest and most silvery laugh at Mrs Fraser's latest witticism. 

Fischer looked at his watch.

As if on cue an obsequious waiter carried a telephone to their table. 

"Transatlantic telegram, sir," he said, and withdrew. 

At the conclusion of the call Fischer put down the telephone, dabbed his lips with his napkin, and raised his champagne glass.

"And so," he said, "it begins."

His supper companions - if such a term could be used of a meal which had commenced a little before 3am - raised their glasses in response to the toast. 

It was at that precise moment that Kitty became aware of the little party of three who had just entered the club. The movement had attracted her attention at first: at so late an hour new arrivals were an unusual phenomenon. And then she had been struck by the way the light glinted off the startling silver-gilt hair of the woman of the party. As a blonde herself, she took a professional interest in other blondes, and this one would certainly stand out in a crowd. There was something familiar about her, too: surely Kitty had seen her somewhere before? Or perhaps it had been in a photograph? Glad enough of a distraction from Mrs Fraser's prattle and Fischer's oblique, cynical interjections, Kitty watched with interest as the new arrival summoned a waiter with one elegant gesture of an evening-gloved hand, and whispered a few words in his ear.

Rather to Kitty's surprise the waiter gestured in the direction of their booth. The woman nodded, and the three started to head in their direction.

"Friends of yours?" Kitty asked nervously. Given their current pursuits any break in normal patterns might herald disaster; but equally Fischer had played his cards close enough to his chest throughout the events of the last few years, and for all she knew these might be further allies, summoned as she and Mrs Fraser had been to receive Fischer's instructions for how they must go forwards following this crisis of events.

"What? Who?" Fischer's head turned, sharply, but the blonde and her two escorts were already upon them. Abruptly, and with a sick plummetting sensation, Kitty identified her: Polly Perkins of the _Chronicle_. The star investigative journalist of that infamously liberal and muck-raking publication would hardly be present here, at this precise time, by coincidence.

Fischer's glass dropped from his hand and shattered on the floor. Mrs Fraser let out a small, quickly stifled squeak of dismay; her face seemed to have collapsed, and become shapeless and old.

Miss Perkins's eye passed over Kitty with a faint, insulting sense of logging her to deal with later; took in Mrs Fraser with naked distaste which overlay some more complex emotion, and finally came to rest on Dr Fischer.

"Well," she purred, "we meet again. I think, a little earlier than you might have preferred; am I right?"

Fischer's hand must have been going to his pocket: the taller of the two men flanking Miss Perkins caught his wrist, twisting it up firmly and ungently.

"None of that. I'm reliably informed that the proprietors of this establishment really don't care for disturbances on their premises. At least; not ones that they've not planned for."

"They sure don't," Miss Perkins said. Her voice had a carefully infused blend of defiance and contempt but during her life Kitty had learned enough of stage-fright - and a hundred other varieties of fear, come to think of it - to recognise the underlying depth of terror in the other woman, and to respect the sheer will and courage that kept Miss Perkins standing tall and looking straight into Fischer's eyes notwithstanding.

"Anyone pulling a gun in here without the owner's say-so can expect to leave feet-first," Miss Perkins added.

"In any event," the other man said, "Dr Erasmus Fischer - my name is Chief-Inspector Parker, of Scotland Yard. I have a warrant for your arrest and extradition. I arrest you in the name of the law, and anything you say may be taken down and used in evidence. In the circumstances, it would certainly not be in your best interests to try to resist us by force."

Fischer looked at him; looked as though he were considering what to say, and then dropped his head with an acknowledging little nod and a whimsical half-smile on his thin lips. When the British policeman reached out with the hand-cuffs he made no attempt to resist.

Mrs Fraser made an effort to sound haughty, but there was a wobble in her voice. "Arrest him? And on what charge?"

The man who had prevented Fischer going for his gun smiled. "The same charge I'm arresting you on, ma'am. Lieutenant Peterson, RCMP. Mrs Edith Fraser - aka plenty of other names, so my colleagues South of the border tell me - I'm arresting you for being concerned in the unlawful abduction, drugging and imprisonment of Miss Perkins here. And likewise, ma'am, it's my duty to warn you that anything you say may be taken down and could be used in evidence."

Kitty O'Farrell found her voice at last. "Kidnapping! I never heard anything so absurd! I know nothing at all about any such thing!"

The Canadian nodded respectfully at her. "No-one's saying you did, ma'am. Certainly I have no instructions to proceed against you."

The Scotland Yard man smiled; Kitty thought there was something a little grim and chilling about the set of his lips, nonetheless. "Nor I. My apologies for disturbing your evening, ma'am."

And he made as if to withdraw, his prisoner in tow. Mrs Fraser, shocked into indiscretion by Kitty's apparent immunity in the midst of the wreck of all their hopes, said with a vicious emphasis, "Know nothing of kidnapping? Well, I guess there had to be some dirty business she wasn't in up to her pretty little neck. But perhaps you should ask her -"

"My dear Edith!" Fischer's voice had a pleasant deadliness that chilled the blood. Mrs Fraser broke off, abruptly, her mouth agape.

"We are all of us equally innocent, but we should be pleased that the absurdity of the police authorities has not extended to making Miss O'Farrell the object of their grotesque suspicions."

He smiled; his eyes glittered coldly behind the pince-nez. "I, for one, have no fear of extradition. I welcome the opportunity to plead my innocence on British soil, before a British court. I think, Chief-Inspector Parker, that in that event it will be for you to have the unpleasant surprise. Good evening, Miss O'Farrell. I have no doubt that next time we meet the wheel of fortune will have swung again."

As he and Mrs Fraser were taken - discreetly but nonetheless with little possibility of argument - towards the stairs which led out of the club, Fischer made the smallest of inclinations of his head in the direction of the telephone, still lying discarded and, until now, forgotten on the supper-table. Kitty took his meaning instantly, and the tense panic inside her eased a fraction. What they had set in motion would not even be known, as yet, to these earnest policemen, doing their job at the behest of an Empire whose longevity - Holy Mary and the saints willing - might already be measured in hours not decades. And they had chosen to underestimate her and leave her bewilderingly at liberty - frankly, it was almost insulting: if they were going to go to the trouble of trumping up a kidnapping charge against the others then basic commonsense suggested the advisability of including her. Kitty O'Farrell would make the most of the liberty that had been carelessly, condescendingly, left to her. She would start by alerting their friends in this country as to Fischer's plight. Later, perhaps, something might be done for Edith Fraser, also. It was regrettable, but a loose-tongued woman of her stamp would be better with her friends than in the hands of the enemy. The sense of having heaped coals of fire would be pleasant, and it need not, after all, be a permanent inconvenience. 

Kitty stretched out her hand for the telephone. Before she could lift the handset, however, she found her hand being covered by another's. She looked up into the swarthy face of a man who'd been one of a group of three sitting at the next booth. She'd put them down as blue-collar types blowing more they could afford on a rare night on the town. He grinned down at her from a face whose jowls were heavily shadowed with blue-black stubble.

"Say, I recognise you, Miss O'Farrell. Weren't you Sean Grogan's girl?"

She floundered, bewildered, for a second. The shadowy powers who ruled the world in which she had moved for so long now had ruled Grogan unreliable and acted accordingly, and she had accepted their judgement so unquestioningly that by now she could hardly remember what she had felt for Grogan, or if indeed she had felt anything at all.

The man extended a hand. "You've forgotten me, haven't you? It's Milo. Look, don't trouble yourself about calling for a cab home, now that your friends have had to go. We'll look after you. We can't let an old pal's girl be left to see herself home. This can be a rough old town."

She started to make pretty, fluent excuses - this was the worst of timing - but before she was half-way through she realised the three would hardly take no for an answer; at least not without there being more of a scene than she chose to make at this precise moment. And after all they were friendly enough, and, though boisterous, hardly tight. It might be as well for her to allow them to see her home.

She was at the top of the stairs; one of the men was joshing Sam as she retrieved her wrap; Sam opened the door to the street, wishing them goodnight. A passing car's headlight beam pierced the darkness. Dazzled, she glanced down and away - and saw the flash as the light reflected off a wicked three inches of blue-silver steel, which had suddenly sprouted in Milo's hand.

Her instinctive scream was stifled by Milo's hand over her mouth. The big car was waiting just round the corner, its engine running and a fourth man alert at the wheel. She was barely inside before they were off, moving fast out of the city, into which the first early commuters of the morning were already starting to flow.

She was wedged into the back seat of the car, between Milo and one of the other men. They had tied her hands behind her back, and strapped her feet at the ankles. They had not gagged her, but screaming was pointless, and undignified, too, and there was still the ever-present threat of that vicious short-bladed knife.

"Where are you taking me?" she asked sullenly, not expecting a response. The most likely answer was the East River, in any event, but she was not going to give them - whoever "they" were - the satisfaction of knowing she was afraid.

"England," Milo said laconically. She twisted to face him; in the reflected light from the headlights of on-coming cars his face was impassive.

"What?"

"You heard me." There was just enough room for him to gesture. "Little matter of a treason charge to answer over there."

She was spluttering with indignation; anger swamping even her fear. "Treason! I was born in Ireland, and I'm a naturalised American citizen. I owe no allegiance to the British crown. No judge in this state or any other would grant an extradition warrant."

There was the flash of white in Milo's face as he grinned, broadly. "Maybe they would and maybe they wouldn't. Given what you've been dabbling in, it might be evens either way. Specially since a little bird tells me your paperwork isn't all you might like it to be, Miss O'Farrell. But we reckoned we knew you well enough to skip the formalities in any event. There's a 'plane already fuelled and waiting on the runway for you, and a reception committee waiting for you at the other end. This way it avoids embarrassing Uncle Sam. And the President. You see; something tells me you'd always banked on being who you were and who you knew - maybe what you knew, too: who can tell? - to avoid being extradited. Whether you lawfully could be or not."

He exhaled. "Anyway, I don't doubt that once your friend from Chicago with the bad bleach job starts talking to the Mounties there'll be more charges than treason for you to answer. Ones you can't get out of on a wriggle about nationality."

"And this is supposed to make you better than us how?" she spat.

Milo's voice in the darkness was serious. "You get a trial. You get a defence attorney. Who knows? You're a good actress. Maybe you'll even manage to get yourself acquitted. More than you've ever thought good enough for anyone."

His voice was pitiless, now, like the voice of doom. "You've been playing your games for too long, Miss O'Farrell. Good men and bad men, all being sent to their deaths at your whim. And never a drop of the blood falling on your pretty little white hands. But you made a bad mistake when you decided to have the Sky Captain rubbed out."

She could see, now, as the dawn came started to come up over the city in which direction they were heading. And she knew, too, at last, into whose hands she had fallen, and why. 

Milo leaned over her, and breathed very softly into her ear. "You see: we're his Legion. And the Legion looks after its own."


	9. The might of the Royal Air Force confronts the Empire's nemesis

Flying-Officer Percy Arbuthnot was uncomfortably aware that behind his back the men referred to him as "Prune". "The Prune" was used on the rare occasions when they chose to be formal.

In the long watches of the night he frequently and miserably meditated on how his life might have been different if he had not had the misfortune to be born with one uncle a Air-Vice-Marshal, another a Rear-Admiral, and his own father perishing in the mud of Flanders six months before he himself drew breath, so that his formidable uncles had cherished all of their attention on his career -

God had meant him for a meteorologist. Occasionally he allowed himself to believe that he might have made a good one.

A good _civilian_ meteorologist.

He had never asked to be an officer in the RAF; never asked to have that particular weight of guilt and obligation hanging over him. Certainly never asked to have the command of a base entrusted to him, with all that that entailed.

True; one weather station in the wilds of Wester Ross was hardly a critical element in the nation's airborne defence network: it was, Flying-Officer Arbuthnot often thought bitterly, almost tailor-made as a Services oubliette for officers of modest talent and glittering family connections. He was sure the men - who would not have ended up here had they, too, been among the shining ornaments of the Service - knew that just as well as he did.

The entire complement of aircraft on the station consisted of a superannuated and heavily cannibalised Hawker Hart Trainer. That was probably just as well; the field at the head of the sea-loch was the only place for miles around which was flat enough to support an airstrip, and even that wasn't very extensive. Principally they used the 'plane for photographing intricate cloud formations, wave heights and storm spray patterns, and to give off-shore spotter support to the Coastguard services located along the Minch and Cape Wrath shores. When winter came in earnest the 'plane would also be pressed into service by this isolated, closed community for tasks such as locating missing sheep, and dropping bundles of hay, and parcels of medicines and the like to farmsteads cut off by snow in the high glens.

Had it just been the flying, and the collection of technical weather statistics to try to correlate and analyse Arbuthnot would have found his lot in life a happy one. Had he only been the junior weather officer on a large aerodrome, with his allocated specialism filling all his days, that would have answered everything that he wanted out of life.  
It was all that command entailed; specifically, the permanent haunting sense that he was bound to have overlooked something of crucial importance, and the omission would inevitably come to light with horrific consequences which would be All His Fault, that made his days a sick misery and his nights broken and full of bad dreams.  
And as a concrete example, what was he supposed to do with this situation?

He cleared his throat - that was safe, at least - and looked across at Cullinan. He aimed for a suitably impressive bark, but suspected it came over as more as a bronchial cough. Nevertheless, he ploughed onwards. "Yes? I take it you've chosen to bring your little friend into my office for a reason?"

He jerked his head somewhere in the general direction of Douggie McLaggan. Arbuthnot was uncomfortably aware just how far he fell short of that omniscience which he had been told since kindergarten was both the birthright and the duty of a British officer, but nevertheless he knew in what category to place McLaggan. 

Cullinan stood his ground a precise metre-and-a-half on the far side of Arbuthnot's desk. His face was wooden. "Sir," he said. "Douggie found himself early this morning on the Ramsay Estate."

Arbuthnot took a second or so to appreciate the quintessentially British nature of that nomenclature. The last of the Ramsays had expired ingloriously at Lucknow, and the line of distant cousins who had succeeded them had been extinguished somewhere between White's, Tattersalls and the trenches. The creditors had sold to a succession of mushroom industrialists of greater or lesser permanence, the most recent of whom - an American - had taken possession little before Arbuthnot himself had come on station. But, for all that, the fragmented sporting preserves to the North and West of the 'drome were, immemorially, "the Ramsay Estate".

"Oh?" he said coldly. "Doubtless in the development of his fishmongery business? Or perhaps his - ah - promotion of the spirit trade?"

It was an even bet in these parts that the locals were up to their necks in salmon-poaching or illicit distilling. It was almost insulting for McLaggan and Cullinan to give him that exaggeratedly innocent look, almost as if they assumed he knew - or was capable of understanding - nothing about the area.

"It just so happened. Sir." Cullinan said, a wounded tone in his voice. "But he thought you ought to know about the airship. And the warbirds. Up by the house. That he just happened upon. When he was there." 

"What?" Unexpectedly Arbuthnot found himself on his feet, leaning over his desk, all of his weight resting - who knew how they had come there? - upon his knuckles.

McLaggan nodded. "He has the right of it, sir. A Zeppelin - or near enough- and six fighter planes around her. On the lawns below the West Terrace, where they say her old Ladyship - God rest her! - still walks looking for her son coming home from the Indies -"

This sort of thing had never been something he could handle. He cleared his throat. Truly, it had only been a reflex, but it seemed to have an effect he had never experienced before. 

"Sorry, sir," McLaggan said hurriedly. "But I served in Flanders, and I'd not want to see those days come again, if there were aught I could do to stop it. And it seemed to me that if you weren't after knowing what was up there, then maybe you should. Sir."

Arbuthnot cursed under his breath. Someone - the remote, hypothetical someone who in Arbuthnot's dreams ran this crazy base and regularly saved the British Empire with unflurried omniscience - might have known what to do about this emergency. That concentration of fire-power on a remote and private estate might have an innocent explanation, but he had no time to waste if it didn't. What to do? Call for help? Wet, but at least practical. And Arbuthnot hardly had pride to lose.

"Cullinan!" he said sharply. "Priority dispatch! To HQ, at once!"

For once in his life Cullinan ripped up a smart salute. "Sir!" Then a pause, a head placed enquiringly on one side. "Dispatch to say what, sir?"

With a sick sense of his own inadequacy Arbuthnot realised he had no idea whatsoever. "To say - of course to say - " he wavered.

And then - miracle unlooked for - Gresford burst into the office.

"Seven unidentified moving objects spotted on the -" he recognised McLaggan the civilian, and - mindful of the Official Secrets Acts - came to an abrupt and belatedly decorous pause. "That is: on the - ah - on the Thing, sir."

McLaggan looked studiously into the middle distance. "I've often thought for a man in your position the radar apparatus must be fine and convenient, sir."

Gresford's eyes had the intentness of a pleading spaniel. Together with the spaniel's hope and trust that nothing would truly hurt it. Something outside Arbuthnot had taken control of his voice, though.

"Seven? Sizes?"

Gresford swallowed. "A - um - big one- or, or course, a near one and - um - six not so big ones. Or six big ones further away."

Arbuthnot ground his teeth. The radar gadget might be a little temperamental at times - and very definitely on the Top Secret list (though not top secret enough for the locals not to know all about it, evidently; they'd probably incorporated it into the local poaching network somehow or other) - but the men ought to have a little better sense at interpreting it. And this was something he'd worked on. He knew he had. At least; he'd tried.

"Get my plane ready," he snapped. "I'm going up to take a closer look."

Gresford, too, seemed belatedly to have learned the art of the smart salute. He and Cullinan exchanged a glance, and Cullinan ducked out of his office.

"Vector?" Arbuthnot snapped at Gresford, unrolling the large scale map of the Scottish Highlands across his desk. Gresford reached for the parallel rules, and extended a line down from the centre of the Ramsey Estate south and east. 

Arbuthnot gulped. There were many things that could lie on that line, but indisputably one that did.

Balmoral. Where the King, the Queen and the princesses were at this very moment enjoying an unseasonable holiday.

And - Arbuthnot cast his eye over that map - between here and Royal Deeside there was very little else by way of defence for them, if they were indeed the enemy objective.  
The time for hesitation - for debate - was over.

He shrugged into his flying jacket and left his office at a dead run towards the hanger through which was being pushed the superannuated Hawker Hart trainer in which it was his bounden duty to stop six fighter plans and a Zeppelin.

Cullinan, white-faced, met him where the crew were wheeling back the hangar doors. "All power's down to the base, Sir!" he reported. "And our comms lines are out. Oh, and Ferguson's gone AWOL. And it looks like he's taken the codes for the day with him."

Arbuthnot barely spared him a glance. "Use your initiative, man. Get off the base, find yourself anything that can take a message - telephone, ham radio equipment, bloody carrier pigeon if it gets right down to it. But get the message through to HQ. There's a bloody revolution happening, and it's happening here, and it's happening now. And they'd better get themselves off their fat arses and do something about it, hadn't they? So tell them that."

Cullinan's hand went up in a salute."Yes, Sir!"

Once aloft in the cool serenity of the azure skies (there was a truly nasty complex of fronts coming in, a deep depression forming 600 miles out over the Atlantic; the faintest fern-traces of cirrus clouds in the West were heralding its arrival, but somehow Arbuthnot doubted he'd be around see the storm break) he found himself with leisure to think once more. It occurred to him rather vividly that perhaps thinking was an overrated pastime. There was so much time, suddenly; time, and geometry, and the pattern of the snowy Highlands unfolding below, touched like cathedral angels with the gilding of the sun's low rays.

The group of dark specks ahead was unmistakable. Arbuthnot found himself surprised that he had caught up with them so quickly, given the limping speed of the Hawker Hart. He pulled himself up mentally. Of course; even this superannuated crate could out-fly the airship, and the escorts would be constrained by the speed of the slowest member of the group. 

He activated his cockpit microphone, tuned to the general calling frequency. He did not expect them to state their name and business, even when asked to do so in the name of the Royal Air Force, but the rules decreed that he demanded it.

He did so, his voice sounding unnaturally clear in his own ears, as though he were listening to it on the wireless.  
The group swept onwards, apparently oblivious.

He repeated his demand.

Still nothing. 

There was, of course, only one thing to do next.

"Acknowledge my signal! Otherwise I shall have no option but to open fire!"

He had expected a split second's grace before they reacted, but they must have been in communication already on some shielded channel. The last syllable was still on his lips as the six fighter planes swarmed, suddenly, upwards and at him from all angles, like a wasps-nest poked with a stick. He pressed his finger on the firing button and held it down, while manoeuvring the gallant Hawker through desperate, doomed angles she would hardly have dreamt of attempting in her pristine youth a decade or more ago in a last effort to avoid the inexorable triumph of fate.

Arbuthnot never saw the plane which swatted him from the sky. It acknowledged the success of the kill to its fellow hunters with a waggle of its wings, and, as pre-arranged, dropped behind the convoy to ensure that the little RAF base at the head of the sea loch had no further surprises to spring on them. HE shells, dropped from height, should, the pilot reasoned, amply account for anything that the base might have left in its locker.

And so it might, had everyone not unaccountably overlooked the unidentified 'plane which had been ghosting across the hillsides since before dawn.

Like his victim, the enemy went down in blazing wreckage on the hillside. Oblivious, the remaining five warbirds and the deadly cargo they escorted swept onwards towards Balmoral. 

It was then not quite eleven o'clock in the morning.


	10. Destiny sweeps onwards

The convoyed airship swept onwards across Scotland. It was fast - at least, according to its kind - but nonetheless a lumbering Leviathan compared to the tiny predatory warplanes which were forced to cut and swerve around it in far-ranging ellipses, lest by slowing their speed to that of the airship they escorted they might stall their engines and tumble from the sky. Necessity compelled those wild swoops and leaps across acres of open sky: but it lent them the advantage, too, of having a vast volume of space constantly under review by multiple pairs of eyes. It would not be easy for an enemy to sneak up upon them.

That thought was a comfort, since already one of the six escorts who had taken off that morning had unaccountably fallen behind, and though no doubt the pilot would soon reappear, having dealt with whatever operational necessity had compelled him to linger in Wester Ross, nevertheless the other five felt exposed - even, perhaps, somewhat aggrieved -by his absence.

The airship, laboriously, gained altitude to clear the range of mountains that reared up jagged-toothed ahead, and vanished momentarily into the low cloud-bank that capped them. In turn, each of the escorting warbirds took the plunge into the blindness of the cloud cover, switching automatically from sight to dependence on their instruments with the cool efficiency of long practice.

Cool efficiency, however, each pilot realised in the split-second's transition between the low winter sunshine and the clammy suspended-in-time Neverwhere that was the place inside the fog was not - had never been and would never be - enough.

For this was not, after all, just any mission. For the first time, perhaps, the eerie silence of the blanketing cloud brought home to each of them the enormity of the task on which they were engaged, and, contrasted to the scale of that enterprise, how tiny each machine's cockpit seemed, and how isolated and alone her pilot.

From somewhere - distance and direction were alike rendered meaningless by the heavy blanket of the cloud - came a dull thundering. Each pilot felt the adrenaline in his system spike; the grip of hands on joysticks changed, fingers stole towards firing buttons, eyes strained through cockpit canopies to detect shadows, movement, the presence of those Others whom that thunder heralded. 

The sixth pilot's continued absence acquired a new and sinister significance.

The pilots may, perhaps, have been bad men or fools; men deluded by hope of gain or by the foetid glow of that shining evil Destiny a bare step ahead. But no-one would deny their bravery or their skill. They closed up around their charge, knowing that the slightest miscalculation of position could spell disaster, knowing themselves at last to be the hunted, not the hunters. Their course and objective were fixed; the covert preparation of years hanging on the next ninety minutes. They had not expected opposition at this juncture, but they were prepared and armed to resist it, even so.

And resist they did.

When the howling and spitting storm of molten lead burst around them they resisted still: swerving, diving, rolling; prodigal of aerobatic feats which would have won the breath of the Bank Holiday Farnborough crowds again and again had they been there to see.

On and on the enemy pilots fought their unseen unexpected enemy in the enveloping murk. They fought for their lives and their for prides - not less dear the one than the other. They were there only because they had valued the whim of the Best above the will of the Many; and they were ready and more than ready to die for that truth.

So they lashed out - as best they might - at the harrying, barely-glimpsed ghosts who rained death in on them out of the depths of the fog, and the dark places of their own souls.  
One of the original five was missing when they at length won free of the mountains and could drop again below the cloud-base with over eighty miles still to Balmoral. And their enemy remained unseen.

Grimly the four remaining pilots bent to their task. They would win this war, or perish in the attempt.

They had, after all, no option left.


	11. Merchant Princes find allies in strange places

The Directors' floor of Shuttleworths was by 12.15 pm the only inhabited part of the building save for the cubby-hole in which the Commissionaire waited, in case of late or unexpected visitors and to perform his traditional and time-hallowed duty of locking up the building for Christmas and Hogmanay once Mr McPherson - always the last to leave - gave the signal for him to do so.

The draughtsmen and apprentices had shot out of the door the instant the noon hooter had sounded; Shuttleworths' was not so prodigal of half-day holidays for them to waste a second of this one. Most of the offices were dark and abandoned, the Directors having, according to taste and their or their wives' ambitions, dispersed towards Warwickshire for the hunting, Norfolk for the shooting or Paris for - well, Helen Adamson thought with an inner grin, Miss McGinty's gimlet glare had left no-one in the vicinity in any doubt what she believed the junior and bachelor Director who had bid her a cheery farewell as he headed out yesterday evening towards the airport had been planning for his Christmas holiday in the city of Sin and Light.

Even on the Directors' floor there were but three people working that afternoon before Christmas.

There was a line of light from under McPherson's shut office door. These December afternoons were dark, especially when the Clyde fog pressed hard against the windows and the office electric lights were in constant use. Miss McGinty worked on at her typewriter, and Helen kept her own head bowed over her work. She had been offered the opportunity to leave at noon with the others, but had commented demurely that her cousin had offered to send a car for her at four, and that she was happy in the interim to assist Miss McGinty in preparing the customer accounts for December that would be sent out with the first post of the New Year. For the first time she realised fully what the glamour of being part of what the McGinty and McPherson no doubt still thought of, feudally, as The Family entailed: no further questions had been asked, not even which cousin she might have in mind. Indeed though it had been Charles, with typical thoughtfulness, who had arranged for one of the Helensburgh chauffeurs to whisk her away from the office should nothing have occurred by the end of the day, it had been Paul who with a brief nod had confirmed to the man that those were indeed his instructions.

Somehow she rather doubted she would be calling upon the chauffeur's services. Intolerable as it was to be chafing here, in ladylike tweed skirt (the regulation four inches below the knee) and lisle stockings, she felt the rapid pace of great events building. And if she might not be counted among the shapers of those events - well, nevertheless she had contingency plans in her hand-bag and - something rather more practical in the battered brown leather suitcase propped against the hat stand near the entrance to the office.

Miss McGinty raised her head at a sound from outside."Imph! They would have done better to shut the ale-shops the afternoon. I don't doubt some of the hands will have had more than is good for them already. Christmas, indeed! Bacchanalia will be more the mark, I should think."

The shouting from the street was beginning to get more strident. The door from Mr McPherson's office opened.

"Miss McGinty. Miss Adamson. I had a letter from an old friend this morning warning me about trouble in the streets the day. I fear I may have been too ready to set him down as overly excitable." He looked, Helen thought suddenly, almost bashful. "Och, well, ladies. Should you wish to leave now, I don't doubt but that would be the wiser course. The accounts will do as well on the second post after Hogmanay, I daresay, and I'll see ye both right with the Management, should anyone ask. And, of course, it's for me to see ye both safely home."

Both Helen's and Miss McGinty's fingers froze on their typewriter keys at the same instant. This was Vesuvius erupting, the men from Mars landing; never had Shuttleworths' serene ordered existence known such a thing. McPherson delaying the preparation of the December accounts! And proposing to lock up the building before the appointed hour of four!

Miss McGinty found her voice first. "Mr McPherson! You'll no be thinking we're going to run scared of a few lads who've got a bit too much of the whisky in them?"  
A half-brick came sailing through the window behind her which shattered into atoms on the parquet before McPherson could respond. A shard of flying glass must have caught her - Helen could see a smear of blood on the sallow cheek as she turned on the spot.

"The young blackguards! I'll teach them -"

"They're after what's in the safe," Helen said quietly. "This isn't just drunken hooliganism. There's a mind behind it. Wouldn't that be what your "overly excitable" friend will have hinted at, Mr McPherson?"

The old office manager gaped at her - a harsh tinkling sound showed that another half-brick further down the corridor had found its mark. Before, however, McPherson could find breath to answer, Helen added,"It would have been Mr McAllister who wrote to warn you, wouldn't it? Well, Mr Shuttleworth - young Mr Shuttleworth, that is - said I was to tell you, should it become necessary - that - ah - The Family has a high regard for his opinion."

At that moment the Commissionaire - his uniform still immaculate but his face beetroot with the exertion - came pelting into the office.

"Sir! I've bolted the main door. I thought it was necessary. There's a mob outside in the street -"

Still with the icy unnatural calm which had descended on her since the crisis had erupted Helen looked him straight in the eye. "Then you'd best go and secure our rear, also. There's doubtless our hands in that mob, and they'll know about the after-hours exit through the small back door. And maybe you'll find this of assistance if they're through there already."

She reached into the battered suitcase propped against the hat-stand and tossed him the twelve-bore her cousin had lent to her in the back of the butcher's van, which she had unaccountably failed to return, and distended the pristine pockets of his uniform jacket with cartridges. He cast a quick questioning glance around. 

McPherson nodded. "Aye, man. The lassie's right. Be quick about it, and the good Lord go with you." He turned to Helen. "The safe? And what do you know about what might be in the Company's safe?"

She shrugged. "Just what my cousin told me. And that's only what he thought I needed to know. But I don't type with my eyes shut either, Mr McPherson, and I know the Company's been given the Government contracts for part of the new submarine weapons development, and for the coastal early warning system, too. And I don't doubt either of those sets of specs would be worth their weight in rubies to a traitor."

McPherson looked, suddenly, to have become older. "And only two old men and two lassies to keep the Company's secrets safe."

Miss McGinty snorted. "I'll thank you not to refer to me as a lassie, Mr McPherson. At my age it's no' flattering, it's plain daft. And the lassie's a member of The Family, aye, and with her head screwed on, to boot."

McPherson stuck his jaw out. "That may be so. But nevertheless, with the four of us, and but the one gun -"

Miss McGinty put her head on one side. "Now, that reminds me -"

She stalked out of the room, apparently oblivious to the fact that the sounds of glass breaking under the bombardment of hurled missiles from the street below was now reaching a crescendo. Before, however, Helen and Mr McPherson could do more than look nervously at each other she had returned from one of the offices a little way along carrying a long monogrammed pigskin case which both of them had seen one of the younger directors carrying proudly and a trifle nervously into the office that morning.

Without pausing for breath Miss McGinty put the case down on the corner of her desk, took the office bodger and smartly levered up the lid with the sharp point, breaking apart the clasp on the lock with an audible snapping, tearing sound as she did so. Helen gulped; the McGinty fixed her with a steely glare. 

"I don't doubt the Company will compensate Mr Ferguson for the damage to his property. If we're all still here in the morning. And if we are here, it'll be no small thanks to his having left his guns with his other luggage in the office before he was after catching the night train down South."

She cast her eye down at the magnificent weapons, all silver mounts and polished walnut butts as they lay cradled within the midnight-blue velvet of the case's interior. Miss McGinty smiled grimly, and, Helen thought, with a touch of covetousness.

"Matched Purdeys and the gunsmith in Bond Street! I doubt those who made and sold them would have expected them to be used for this."

"Miss McGinty!" Mr McPherson exclaimed. "You're surely not going to fire on those below?"

She picked up one of the two guns and the cartridge pouch, stalking to the window and concealing herself behind the blind.

"I'll mark they've mounted a telegraph pole on a lorry," she observed to no-one in particular. "No doubt they'll looking to batter down the doors momentarily." 

She loaded the gun in crisp economical movements.

"And if that isn't Willie McCann at the wheel," she observed dispassionately. "The ungrateful chiel."

As she raised the gun to her shoulder and poked the muzzle out through the star-shaped hole the half-brick had left in the pane both McPherson and Helen stole to the neighbouring window and looked down in fascinated horror on the scene below: the mob, clearing a path for the improvised battering ram, trying to get up speed in limited space for a run at the heavy bronze doors.

A sharp crack followed by a high-pitched whine. Suddenly the lorry driver was holding his hand to the side of his head, feeling for an ear which was no longer there.

"Miss McGinty!" McPherson said, in accents of the deepest shock. "All they that take the sword shall perish by the sword! Matthew 26:52""

Before responding she sent the second shot unerringly into the shoulder of the man trying to extricate McCann from the driver's seat. He fell backwards, clutching his shoulder.   
Miss McGinty broke the gun and expelled the spent cartridges to the office floor.

"And rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft," she commented dispassionately. "First Samuel, 15:23."

Even in this desperate pass there was a slightly sardonic set to McPherson's lips.

"I don't doubt you speak from authority as to that," he murmured. 

Coolly she reloaded the gun and selected two more targets from the group who had been trying - not, as it turned out, quite successfully enough - to use the cover of the lorry to rescue the two injured men and continue with the task of battering down the front door.

"Hold your blether, man," she said. "We won't win this war by shouting about it."

The thin, stiff old face suddenly broke into a grin as she spotted Helen’s face. "Surprise you, did I, lassie? Ah well, you'd no reason to know my father was the head ghillie on one of the finest sporting estates in Sutherland. I had my first wee gun about the time I had my first doll, and I'll not admit which one I spent most of my time with. I don't suppose they taught you to shoot at that fancy school of yours in the South?"

Helen muttered something vague about rabbits. The McGinty sighed. "Well, we've no the shot to waste, so maybe you'd be best reloading, and leave the shooting to me."

Helen reached for her case. "In a few minutes, Miss McGinty. Before then - well, my cousin said I should call for help if things got difficult."

McPherson looked up at her; it occurred to her he had, while they'd been talking (the initial burst of sniping had driven back the attackers for the moment while they improvised a shield for those manning the battering ram) been fiddling with the telephone handset on the McGinty's desk.

"They would seem to have taken the exchange, lassie. That would be the first idea to occur to this sort of gentlemen. The line's dead."

Helen simply nodded. There was a set of scrawled notes in the pocket of the sensible tweed skirt against this very contingency. "There's the wireless shed up on the roof."

Miss McGinty's eyebrows drew together, and she swung round. "You're no telling me you've been skylarking with the apprentices?"

There was something menacing about the way she rolled her "r"s on the word "skylarking" that sent a cold shudder down Helen's spine, even though she knew the McGinty's gun was empty, and pointed conscientiously elsewhere in any event. Helen looked down at the toes of her sensible brogues.

"No," she muttered. Actually, her attempt to join the little group of Company hams who practised their hobby at lunchtimes, and before and after office hours had been ignominiously rebuffed, but she didn't propose to go into that with the McGinty: none of that mattered now. Without more, she caught up her bag and made for the back staircase that wound up and round the lift shaft eventually to open onto the building's flat roof.

The parapet was high; provided she took care she could not be seen from the street below. Dropping to her knees and blessing that at least she had no need to worry about damage to these stockings Helen fumbled in her bag for the Verey pistol. She might be able to get out a signal over the ham wireless apparatus or she might not, but there was something she could do, and she knew there were friends down below in the murk watching for it. She fired a burst of green stars up into the sky - waited for a counted sixty seconds - and fired another. And then, after a similar pause, another. 

She did not wait to see how the mob down in the street below - their yelling sounding curiously thin and disjointed from this Olympian height - reacted to that. Round the back of the lift-shaft column, on the opposite side from the door from which she had emerged, was a low building, which had been presumably once intended to house ventilation or heating plant, but which had long since been colonised by the hams. Save for that brief moment six months ago she had not set foot in the wireless shed, but as she ducked through the door and sank into the battered old chair in front of the equipment Helen felt through her rising panic a sense of familiarity: since the day before yesterday Charlie, Paul, Joe, Dex and a bewildering assortment of the Helensburgh staff (Paul, or perhaps the near-legendary Uncle Henry, had obviously selected servants who were capable of sharing their masters' scientific interests) had been drumming the rudiments of amateur radio procedure into her, and she at least felt confident enough to don the headphones and turn the set on, and to have at least a passing grasp of what the various buttons and dials were for.

Slowly, methodically, blessing the months and years of tedium in her Hampshire village in which drilling her Guide troop to take the District Commissioner's Shield year on year had polished her command of Morse to a fine edge, Helen began to rap out her cousin's borrowed call-sign, conscious of Paul's face as he had instructed her solemnly that only an emergency of the current dimensions could justify such an unsanctioned enormity.

She scanned up and down with care, as she had been taught, trying to pick up the faintest flicker from anyone who might be listening out. It was a bad time of day, she had understood; dawn or dusk would have been better, but she couldn't help that. And the crew of Paul's airship, not more than a hundred or so miles away, would at least be waiting for her signal. If, that was -

Helen's shiver had nothing to do with the draughts making their way across the roof and into the shed. They might all be dead already - each one of them swatted from the sky by the faceless enemy - Joe and Dex and Paul and the airship crew and LeFauve and, of course, Charlie - she had been wholly honest when she told McPherson that she read and understood much more of the contracts she was asked to type, even the technical specifications, than he might suspect, and she knew exactly what the modifications Charlie had specified to his new Avro machine were intended to do. That morning Charlie would have taken his place as an airborne fighter once more. 

Well. It might be that they were dead already. But she was not, and if she survived to do no more than speak their epitaph and procure that they were revenged then that was the job to her hand.

At that moment she heard a very faint pipping on the very edge of reception; not a static buzz but something which resolved into the structured regularity of dots and dashes. Someone had picked up her call, and was trying to respond. Very carefully Helen boosted the signal, adjusted the headphones, and started to jot down the signal groups which denoted the stranger's callsign and initial introduction. 

VU, not GM was the callsign prefix. Not the airship, then. Not a British station at all, in fact. But where?

On the map stuck on the wall above the wireless apparatus a forest of little paper flags stuck into various territories showed the call-sign prefixes proper to each. Helen scanned it frantically, until almost by accident the prefix she sought leapt out at her.

VU. India.

By some quirk of the airwaves she had picked up an answer to her signal from half-way round the world. Her heart sank; how could someone located so far away - a minimum of three weeks by sea, forty hours by air - possibly be of any help in this crisis? 

But he was the only one to have answered. And what was more, he was continuing to press her: he wanted to know who she was, or, more to the point, he knew perfectly well that she was not who she was asserting she was. It would seem this was someone who knew Paul Shuttleworth's fist so well that in a few keystrokes he had cottoned on to the usurped call-sign, and was showing signs of being gravely concerned by it. 

There was a sheet of foolscap pinned up below the map, she'd noticed earlier. It bore a list of call-signs, with names scribbled next to them. Presumably they were the ones who most frequently contacted this station. If she was right, then, the stranger's call-sign should be on the list.

It was. The Maharajah of Idripur.

Helen gulped, and thought with brief, gloriously inappropriate hilarity that if this sort of thing happened to one a lot in amateur wireless it would be more to the point if the Company hams had had the common sense to leave a copy of Debrett's Correct Form on the shelf with the technical manuals, to say nothing of Who's Who. However. There was one distinct advantage. If she could convince him she was telling the truth it was at least plausible that a Maharajah might be inclined to take a plot involving regicide rather personally.

The dialogue that followed - conducted as it was entirely in dots and dashes - had a peculiarly surreal feel to it. It was, Helen said, trying to describe it later, rather like the silent films to which a daring nursemaid had smuggled her - under the strictest terms of secrecy - when she was a child. She had made up her own voices for the swooning heroines, dashing heroes and mustachioed villains, and by the time she left the picture palace would be convinced that the whole cinema had heard them speaking just as she had.  
The Maharajah's "voice" had, in Helen's head, an impeccably Etonian accent, but with a slight floweriness of diction which was the only sign of his non-English origins. He was, however, blissfully decisive once she had managed to convince him of her bona fides (there were a couple of odd pauses in the earlier part of the conversation: she pictured him summoning minions and barking orders to corroborate whatever could be corroborated). It must have worked; the tone became suddenly warmer (and it was odd how one could tell that through Morse, too) and before she knew what was happening he was suggesting that he terminate the conversation so that he could immediately get on to Delhi and alert the Viceroy as to the Empire's imminent peril.

Helen gulped. "T.H.E V.I.C.E.R.O.Y?" she tapped in hesitantly.

Clearly the Maharajah could decode an entire complicated but unspoken thought process which went "And you think the King's personal representative on the Indian sub-continent is going to listen to some far-fetched story just because you heard it from some ham on the wireless?"

"E.T.O.N" he responded. "C.R.I.C.K.E.T."

Helen briefly considered whether she would be more likely to believe a preposterous conspiracy story just because it was the Goal Attack from her school netball team (for whom she had played a competent if hardly stellar Goal Defence) telling her. As she was having difficulty in recollecting anything about the woman (Elaine? Elspeth?) apart from a vague impression that she'd been really rather a dim type it seemed improbable. Men were very odd.

There was no point in arguing, however, even if time and the Maharajah had permitted. After she had signed off she sat over the now silent apparatus for some time shaking from reaction and the sheer enormity of it all.

_I've just sent the entire British Empire to battle stations._

Eventually she roused herself and stumbled back down the staircase - she was very cold by now - to the room where Miss McGinty and Mr McPherson were having an argument so impassioned that they barely noticed her return.

"Now that the cartridges are spent I doubt we can hold them at the door."

"That may be so, Miss McGinty, but my duty is to the Company. And those are the Company's trade secrets in the safe. I cannot countenance what you propose."

"Man! Better we fire it now and have done with it, than risk letting them fall intact into the hands of that murdering crew."

Helen privately felt that if the remainder of the cartridges had been used with the precision of the first four that Miss McGinty was being a trifle hypocritical, but kept this opinion to herself. Anyway, at this moment the Commissionaire reappeared.

"I've barricaded both the front and back doors as best I can, but I doubt they'll hold. And I'll not go bail for what'll happen when they break through: they're fair wild and getting wilder. And no sign of the police! What can they be thinking of?"

McPherson turned towards Helen. "And have we any hope of anyone coming to help?"

She opened her mouth - conscious that to babble of Maharajahs and Viceroys would be unkind - since however elevated the quarter from which she had sought help it would still not be possible for them to transcend the laws of physics to send it in anything approaching adequate time. Miss McGinty turned towards the window making a sharp, sshing gesture.

"Hold your blether, and listen."

Above the yelling of the mob outside there was a new noise: the tramp of measured feet and the sound of singing, getting louder and louder. 

_The people's flag is deepest red,  
It shrouded oft our martyred dead,   
And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold,   
Their hearts blood dyed its every fold. _

Helen moved towards the window and saw a sight which would remain with her all her life: a phalanx of men in soft caps, working corduroys and mufflers striding firmly down on the besiegers and at their head Chris Sugden, leaning far out of the passenger side of a lorry which was being driven at walking pace, holding a megaphone through which he was leading the singing.

The mob, realising they were facing an attack on another front, turned to face the visible threat. Someone threw a brick; it glanced off the lorry cabin. The marchers never broke step.

_Then raise the scarlet standard high  
Within its shade we'll live and die,   
Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer,   
We'll keep the red flag flying here. _

The mob turned; irresolute. Helen, sharp-eyed, thought she started to see some shadowy figures start to drift away from the back: whoever had planned this had evidently no stomach to remain against determined opposition. Chris put his megaphone to his lips again.

"What're you waiting for, lads? There's a job to be done here. Are we going to let a cowardly, weak-kneed bunch of Fascists and Fenians in the pay of the worst of the class oppressors take Glasgow's streets from the working man? Are we?"

"NO!!!!" the marchers yelled with one voice. Chris let the lorry door swing crazily out - for a moment he was outlined on the lorry step - and then he precipitated himself out and forwards, rushing forward into the mob, fists swinging wildly, his cohorts at his back.

Battle was joined. The Verey pistol had done its work.


	12. The struggle continues

Joe cursed under his breath. They had not the resources to spare for mistakes, and he and Red should have made more of that fortuitous cloud bank.  
They had had the advantage of clearer sight over the enemy in the murk - Dex had ensured that. And surprise, too. Yet they had downed only one of the foe - besides, admittedly, the one slain in his careless gloating by Red earlier. 

To give Shuttleworth's airship time to get into position, and Dex a chance to disarm the weapon, they needed to take out the remaining four escorting birds in the next ten minutes at the absolute outside, but the skies were now clear all the way to Balmoral, and they had lost the advantage of surprise. 

And they were still outnumbered two to one.

Still. Spilt milk. No point repining. 

Joe swung in, fast and low. The bulk of the airship gave him a little cover; on the other side Red, well-disciplined, mirrored his manoeuvre. The enemy swarmed out, and he knew the fierce surge in his blood and the leaping of his heart as he entered his native element. The guns spoke beneath his hands, and the Warhawk answered to his thought, and he exulted in the conflict even as the cold calculating part of his mind assessed the odds, and found the answer to his sums unfriendly.

For they were good, the enemy: three of them had converged upon him even as the white 'plane which had led the formation - the one with the bluntly aggressive stubby, swept back wings, the hallmark of one of the newer Continental designers - had taken on Red and was plainly proving as much as he could handle.

Three aces on one were about as much as Joe thought he could handle, too. He carved a path out and away, the other aces on his tail. If only he could take the battle away from the vicinity of the airship and let Dex's team edge a little closer in their own blimp - not that they could chance the interception until all the aces were accounted for. But if he -

The Warhawk climbed; steeply, unexpectedly and to the confusion of her foes. At the apex Joe flipped her over on her back, round and back and up and back again in a fast, flattened figure of eight. It did the trick: the leader of the three attackers - confused by Joe's manoeuvres - took the full charge of Joe's port-mounted gun in his fuselage. Smoke trailed out scarf-like behind him, and he broke away, lost on the wind: the plane spiralling aimlessly, her pilot dead or dying.

The two laggards now took up the challenge, trading Joe shot for shot as they locked in battle over the far moors and snow-capped bens. One lucky burst accounted for the smaller of Joe's attackers - in the brief split second of respite before battle was joined again with the last of the enemy he caught on the cockpit radio Red's pre-arranged, one letter signal, repeated over and over on automatic transmission.

X.X.X.X.X

 _Baling now._ Alive, thank god, but no longer active in the fight.

The battle was Joe's alone.

The two planes snarled and yapped at each other, weaving in and out, throwing every trick they had learned at each other, trading lead with prodigal hands, battered and shaken almost to pieces by the recoil of their armaments and the pressures of the G-forces on their bodies, deafened by the scream of bullets and the dense pressure of explosives, their nostrils thick with the smell of cordite and their mouths parching for a sip of water.

But Joe had the edge on the other flier; their duelling was wearing the other out faster. Once - twice - openings offered, which Joe exploited with some effect, though not to deliver the coup de grace. And then - a third chance offered itself, and Joe gave it his best shot. The other plane immolated itself, and a leaping plume of flame and smoke which arose from the braeside far below.

Joe wrenched the Warhawk round again, and headed back towards the airship. Three down for sure, and if Red had taken his man with him before ditching - and with any breath of the luck they had surely earned he must have done - then the way lay clear for Dex's team to bring their 'ship in line above the blimp and board. All that was needed now was -  
The white plane with the aggressively backward swept wings came up from a fold of hills like a wolf erupting from the thicket where it had lain in ambush. 

Joe's hand went to his firing button - 

And nothing whatsoever happened.

Whether his gun had jammed - but it had been overhauled by Dex before the fight, and guns overhauled by Dex never jammed - or whether a lucky shot by his last enemy had ripped something away, or that he had simply exhausted all his ammo was immaterial now. In that icy eternal split second as he looked straight at the on-coming enemy Joe knew with a bone-deep certainty that he had thrown the dice and lost, and that there would be for him no return match.

He was unarmed, and looking down the barrel of a gun aimed by the man - belatedly he recognised the significance of the white 'plane - who had once boasted that if the Armistice had not come so early he would have downed more Allied fighters than both the brothers Von Richthofen combined.

They had said that in such circumstances one saw one's whole life pass in front of one, but Joe knew now with absolute certainty that it was a lie; all he saw was a pair of lively, squirrel-alert dark eyes, set in a face so familiar he could have sketched it in the dark. His lips moved in a final phrase of love and farewell -

When an Avro - its nose-cone and forward fuselage painted with the rippling flame-red device of the risen phoenix - came up out of nowhere already charged with the screaming anger of battle, and reared up between him and the enemy.

Joe's radio crackled into life.

"Let the RFC end what the RFC started. This fight is mine."

The voice - phrasing, timbre, accent - was chillingly familiar - in, Joe realised abruptly, with the cold ache which comes of belated revelation too late to do any conceivable good, both its contralto and baritone variations. 

The pilot of the white plane bent to his guns, but Charlie had clearly planned this encounter from the moment Joe had shared with him his suspicions about the identity of the aces recruited by the New Jacobite Brotherhood. He wasted no time in subtlety, but powered the Avro right into the heart of the maelstrom, firing as he went. The two planes went down together in flaming fragments, and Joe was left master of the skies, dry-eyed and heartsick behind his empty guns.


	13. The forlorn hope gives its all to disarm the weapon

Paul tried to compress himself in the smallest space possible in the forward navigation capsule, acutely conscious of the unfamiliar weight of the parachute pack on his shoulders and the jangle of the armoury of tools slung around his waist and hips, watching through the glass as inch by perilous inch the airship took itself into a matched course and speed to that of the oblivious blimp below them. Surely, surely the other must have seen their approach, for all their care and the scant protection of the already westering sun at their back?

But no, it seemed: onwards they crept, matching velocities with such precision that at length they and the 'ship below seemed the only immobile things in the gliding heavens.  
The American engineer (he had told Paul to call him Dex, but Paul's inherent shyness baulked at that, given the American's genius status and the shortness of their acquaintance) was abruptly in the hatchway.

"Time for us to go," he said. "Hope you've wrapped up - it's going to be kinda chilly out there." 

Paul, suddenly unable to trust his voice, nodded. The American looked at him questioningly for a second, and then gave him a quick, shy smile.

"You'll do just fine," he said. "Just stick close behind me and make sure your friend the Viscount doesn't press any buttons on any machinery he doesn't recognise. In fact, make that: stop him from touching any machinery whatsoever once we get on board, period."

Paul vented a quick snort of laughter. It was true, Jerry had been a nightmare on the voyage so far; wandering aimlessly through the cabin, humming tunelessly and twiddling with things at random until Greenwood, who had been huddled in a glassy, almost trace-like state since they had taken off, had jerked suddenly upright and offered to punch his lights out if he didn't stop it. It had taken only a couple of words from the American - he had barely bothered to turn his head round to utter them - to reduce both of them to half-ashamed silence. Paul had wondered - for he would, one day, have to exercise authority himself - how one achieved not merely the ability to do it, but to gauge when not to. For surely the American had known that each of them needed to deal with the tension in his own way, at least until those ways collided.

The American had not, it seemed, exaggerated his opinion of the weather. The wind howled in through their clothes as if they'd been so much tissue paper. The hatchway was suddenly like the mouth of Hell, and the void outside unthinkable.

"Dearborn -" Paul said, suddenly irresolute - how could a chance so slender ever succeed? How could they have thought it might? Surely he should say something to inhibit the inevitable disaster of this preposterous attempt?

But before he could utter a word the American shrugged, muttering something that was blown away on the wind, tested his harness - and was suddenly gone through the hatch, leaving behind only the whine of the cable running out from the drum under the sure professional hand of the winchman. 

The spooling of cable stopped. There was a pause, lengthening into an eon - a single tug on the line, in response to which the winchman let it out another six feet or so - and then there were two pronounced jerks on the cable. 

The winchman, obviously no longer having to struggle, turned the drum in reverse, and the empty harness came slowly up. Paul found Jerry, apparently conceding him the seniority (or simply, a stray part of his brain thought cynically, assessing accurately that Paul's nerve might not hold as long as the others'), holding it out to him. He clicked it on with suddenly clumsy hands; tested the security of the buckles and, without allowing himself time to think, stepped out through the hatch into empty air, aware even as he did so of the faintest pressure of what might have been an encouraging boot not-quite-connecting with his backside.

It was colder than he had believed possible, even inside the 'ship. The wind whistled in his ears, and the bulk of the enemy ship below rushed up to meet him. He stumbled on landing, felt, belatedly, the pressure through his sternum as the winchman braked, had a sudden fear he would be swept from his perilous perch into the void, grabbed at something by his feet - and realised he was clinging to the severed edge of a hole slashed roughly through the reinforced cloth forming the outer skin of the blimp. He just had sense to lower himself through it, and as he did found his boots being caught and guided into position. His hands followed; blessedly, he was out of the wind, and had something to cling onto. He remembered, belatedly, his instructions, and gave two jerks on the cable, only releasing the harness a split second before the winchman started to rewind the drum.

There was a sudden small flicker of light; Dearborn had lit his flashlight. They were both crouched on some species of gantry just inside the roof of the airship; the helium bags hung below, eeriely bloated and sinister in the gloom. He inspected Paul's face, and nodded, as if satisfied.

"Better start climbing down to the bottom," he said with authority. "I'll see the others inside."

He gestured. At his feet was a rope dangling down into the innards of the airship; he must have been carrying it wound round his body. Paul nodded, too overwrought for words, caught the rope between wrists and ankles, and started to swarm down it, like far away days in the sunlit gymnasium at school, he supposed, and yet so dramatically unlike, forcing one's passage between the narrow aperture between the inflated bags, the rough rope skinning one's palms, and all the time the oppressive darkness. From above there came odd creaks and the whine of the winch machinery, and once a suppressed burst of swearing in Jerry's unmistakeable voice, quickly hushed. And then there was another weight on the rope above him and it jerked like a live thing so he feared to fall, but then, thank God, there was something solid beneath his feet, and nothing to do but collapse to the floor of the compartment, and wait for the other five to join him, and for their true danger to begin.


	14. More from the forlorn hope

Behind them the confused sounds of the struggle died away. Jerry and his friends had piled in upon the surprisingly small handful of airship crew they had found in the rear part of the nacelle with all the advantages of surprise, youth, and the conviction that their strength was as the strength of ten because their cause was just, and Paul, slightly to his shame, had not had to throw a punch in anger before Dearborn had beckoned him away from the fray, down one of the side passages towards the control centre of the ship.

"Stop right where you are."

The voice was cool, cultivated and somehow chilling in its very ordinariness. It might, Paul thought, very easily have been one of his dons. Indeed when the man looked up from the control panel over which he had been bending Paul found himself gazing dumbfounded into the face of a very distinguished scientist indeed; a Cambridge professor of physics, hinted to have been unlucky to have missed a Nobel prize the previous year.

And, from the change in the professor's face, it would appear he had been recognised too. Paul was unsurprised; that lecture at the Royal Society had been only just before the start of Michaelmas term, and he'd not scrupled to pull all the strings he never used to get tables at restaurants or evening engagements with attractive girls so as to be seated in the front row - 

He had, too (he blushed fiercely inwardly at the memory, and, a split-second later, wondered that in this crisis he could still remember, let alone mind it) ventured on a question, and thus made himself the target for a riposte remarkable not merely for its wit and appositeness, but for a depth of smiling, pitiless savagery that in no other sphere but the academic be deemed acceptable in a public forum.

That memory drove him forward across the threshold, ahead of Dearborn.

"So," he said in a rush, lest his nerve fail him, "ah - it seems you have discovered the merits of applied science after all, Professor Lindow."

He saw Lindow's hand begin to come up - his paralysed mind tried, but failed to take in the significance of the evil, snub-nosed weapon in his hand - and then he felt himself being roughly caught from behind and thrown down and aside as there was a huge roaring and a sharp flash of agony in his leg.

Paul's face was inches from the deck. He could hear voices above his head, confused shouting, the noise of a struggle. Something hit the deck hard; there was the sharp crack of an explosion - God only knew where the bullet went - and the dropped revolver slid along the decking a few inches from Paul's nose. He put out a shaky hand and stopped it.  
The right leg of Paul's fatigues was already sticky with drying blood, and the pool continued to spread slowly: despite the throbbing agony he supposed that the stray bullet which must have broken his leg had fortunately missed any of the major blood-vessels. 

He raised his head cautiously. The tableau that met him had a curious air of suspended animation. The American, holding an odd, futuristic weapon, had Lindow covered. Lindow, however, had his hand stretched behind him and was holding some lever which protruded out from the machine that was bolted into the control centre.

"I think," Lindow said, a cold sneer infusing his voice, "that this represents what your compatriots would no doubt describe as a Mexican standoff."

Dearborn shrugged. "I daresay. If they spent too much time at the movies, that is. I'd prefer to call it an awkward interruption, myself."

Lindow's face contracted in an incredulous expression."What? Have you any conception of what would happen if you forced me to release the deadman lever?"

"I guess I just might, at that. Having come across your particular brand of crazed logic a time or some before now." The gentle irony in Dearborn's voice warmed Paul like a stiff brandy. It occurred to Paul that on his own ground - the panelled rooms of the Royal Society, with a respectful audience hanging on his every word - Lindow looked like a bigger man than he did now against this incongruous backdrop of death-and-glory, pulp-fiction heroics. Dearborn, here, had the unselfconscious assurance of a man on his native turf.

Lindow's eyebrows went up, pointed with patrician disdain. "You do? So you know that if my hand were to slip - just enough to let the lever to come up and complete the deadman circuit - the weapon would implode - turn itself into our own personal sun - and everything for ten or more miles around us would be boiled away into nothingness in the blink of an eye?"

Dearborn's voice never altered. "Well, it sure sounds like a godawful mess, and a plumb backwards way of fixing up a deadman circuit. But like I said; nothing I wouldn't have expected from your type of mind."

"My type of mind? What could you possibly know about that? "

Dearborn gestured encouragingly with the end of his weapon. "Suppose you tell me about it? After all, we aren't going anywhere - least, anywhere you haven't planned."

Lindow sneered. "You never spoke a truer word. Every command circuit on board answers only to my voice, and mine alone."

"Really? The men must sure hope that you don't catch a heavy cold while you're airborne - But doubtless you've put fail safes into your design to deal with that sort of thing -?"

Belatedly Paul realised what the American was doing. Paul was within three feet of the control centre and had his hand on a gun, and yet Lindow had overlooked him - appeared, in fact, wholly unconscious of any threat he might represent - so focussed was he on the sheer vulgarity of having to defend not only his choice of field, but the design options he had made. 

And Dearborn was bent on making sure that continued to be so. Even if Lindow killed him for it.

 _Seize the day_ a voice said inside his head, and Paul was suddenly in motion. Lindow was still turning to face him as the gun went off, at near point blank range, and, despite the agony of his damaged leg, Paul was on top of the control panel before the weight of the dying man's hand could release the lever. 

The pressure on the deadman switch must have been constant, near enough, for nothing happened: the relief and pain combined were so overwhelming for a moment that black spots circled on the edge of Paul's vision, and he fought against dizziness.

The Professor's body, the blood darkening and spreading across his torso from the bullet wound, fell away behind him.

“Nicely done,” Dearborn said, squatting down in front of the evil gadget, popping a wafer of gum in his mouth and removing a front panel with a few quick, economical movements. “Just don’t you let yourself get distracted now. Not until I’ve had the chance to disarm this sucker - oh, Jeez!”

Paul’s head jerked up at his tone. “What?”

“Guess - what was he called, Lindow? - couldn’t resist the temptation to tinker with the design; up the power to weight ratio a little, looks like. Jeez! It was on the edge of its envelope for airborne operation as it was. Firing it would have torn it apart, and the ship with it. Theoreticians!” His tone made it sound rather like an obscenity.

“Can you do anything about it?” Paul was rather proud of the steady way in which his voice came out; almost as though this was the sort of question he asked every day, and the current circumstances as routine as cycling up St Giles to a coaching. Dearborn sounded, he thought, rather surprised to be asked.

“The design? Sure. Lindow wasn’t as clever as he thought he was. Makes disarming it somewhat more problematic, though. Take a bit longer. So just keep your hand right there - nice and steady - if you don’t mind, while I get right down to it.”

Given Lindow’s graphic description of the white-hot boil of fury that releasing the deadman switch would unleash, it was hardly as though Paul felt he had any option to doing as instructed. It was something to have something useful to do, after all; something to take his mind off the agony in his leg, and the fact that he had just killed a man.

Oh, and that in a few minutes, come what may, he would be dead himself. That, too.

Whether the American engineer (who had spared a second to drop a comforting pat on his shoulder, but whose hands were now moving deftly among the mass of wiring in the innards of the machine) disarmed the infernal gadget, or not, he was done for. He tried, fiercely, to will his mind to accept that as reality. It would only be the method of his passing about which there was any choice.

 _As ye shall answer for it on the dreadful day of judgement_ the priest had abjured at Alicia Lansbury’s wedding two months ago. Paul had been struck by the phrase then; the priest had pronounced it with a sort of gloomy relish, almost as though he expected half the congregation had been in two minds about whether it would be quite the done thing to mention the groom’s four wives in Baluchistan, and his mad mistress in the attic, and needed all the exhortation they could get; which just proved, he’d joked with Gherkins afterwards, how little the priest knew about George Faulkner-Dunbar, who had to be one of the most painfully earnest men in existence, and surely quite the least likely to have a dark and hidden secret -

Though not, it occurred to him abruptly, as unlikely as that Paul Shuttleworth, the bespectacled, bookish heir to a glittering merchant princedom, tipped by everyone who knew him for a First, known in his set as “the Ghost of Bodley” for his habit of being found day or night in some cranny of Oxford’s libraries, should be about to sacrifice his life in a fantastic death or glory mission, trying to foil the plans of a cabal of treasonous, world-encompassing would-be regicides. Or that the same Paul Shuttleworth had just killed a man, consciously and deliberately. His hand on the deadman switch was sticky with drying blood. 

“Have you - have you ever killed anyone?” Paul blurted. Dearborn didn’t look up; his hands continued their swift, intricate task.

“Uh, you mean directly or indirectly?”

His soft drawl was conversational, reassuringly prosaic. His question, however, was baffling.

“I’m sorry? Indirectly?”

The American shrugged. “Well, take this thing just for a start. I designed it. It goes off, who’ll have killed everyone in the blast zone? Think about that one, ‘cause I sure am. You want to be an engineer? Well, engineers kill more than generals. Even if you stick to bridges, odds are they’ll take tanks over them sooner rather than later.”

It was the longest speech Paul had heard Dearborn make. Out of the maze of conflicting ideas it flung up he seized upon one.

“You designed it?”

His natural politeness stopped him from continuing, but the American had, it seemed, supplied the missing question for himself.

“You mean, how did it wind up in the hands of a bunch of homicidal megalomaniac crazies?” His mouth was twisted in a wry grimace. “I guess; as the result of a long series of misjudgements and bad calls. Not all of them mine.” His hands never faltered in their work, Paul noted, nor did he look up, but Paul sensed that he, too, was conscious of his proximity to the judgment seat, and that his own ghosts pressed close upon his heels.

The American cut two wires, and gave a small noise of satisfaction. “If your hand’s starting to cramp on that switch, you can let it go now,” he said. “I’ve disconnected the deadman circuit. Still need to disarm a couple more, but we’re on our way.”

Paul looked cautiously down at his hand, which seemed to have been locked in position for a hundred years. “You’re sure?”

Dearborn's lips quirked; after a second Paul realised he was suppressing a grin. And, he thought belatedly, it was colossal cheek, he supposed, querying a senior engineer about the workings of his own design. His voice had an amused note, too.

“You sure think like an engineer. Well done. Never take anyone’s word for it when it’s system-critical. You should do well, if we get out of this one OK.”

That brought reality home with a violent blow beneath the solar plexus.

“I won’t be getting out of here,” he said flatly. “That first round Lindow let off? It went mostly through my parachute pack. Saved my skin, I suppose, but -”

He shrugged. The silk of his parachute was doubtless shredded ribbons, even if, with his leg, he could have made it to the exit he supposed Jerry and the others had, by now, jumped through.

The American raised his brows. “Mind if I take a look?” 

Awkwardly, Paul shifted his position so Dearborn could inspect the damage for himself, biting down on his lip to suppress an exclamation of pain as the movement caught his injured leg.

“Take it steady, now,” Dearborn said. “No need to mess about with that leg any more than you need. Landing on it’s going to be nasty enough.”

“But I said -”

The American’s jaws moved, as he continued to chew on his gum. It somehow gave him an air of immovable resolution. “Sure you did. I heard you. And you aren’t going to jump with that ‘chute, I agree with you there, too.”

Paul felt the straps being unbuckled as his parachute was removed. The sound of the pack hitting the deck was jarring, left him feeling exposed.

“What do you weigh, about 160?”

Dimly, Paul tried to do the calculation. He was 11 stone 2, so that meant - that meant -

He nodded weakly. “Near enough. I suppose.”

“Well, mine’s rated for well over our combined weight. Due to an assumption that if I have to evacuate from anywhere, odds I’ll be having to drag some irreplaceable bit of kit with me. And in my book 'irreplaceable' tends to mean 'bulky'. Hence -”

He slipped a set of buckles and plaques which were attached to his own pack, and pulled out an assortment of webbing straps. “I’d better warn you, I’ve never tried this system with a human being before, and I wouldn’t like to go bail for how it’s going to play out. You could end up with a few broken ribs, and, like I said, the landing’s going to be a doozie - if you could contrive to faint on impact, I would - but there’s no reason we shouldn’t both get out of here alive. The emergency escape hatch is over behind that panel, so you won’t even have to crawl far.”

Paul noticed, now he was looking for it, the symbols stencilled on the white-painted metal. So even Lindow’s faint, spurious glamour as a man on a suicide mission was fake; if they hadn’t burst in on him when they did, he’d have taken his escape. His own ‘chute must be somewhere around here, then - if only Paul could summon up the energy to look for it, and trust that the dead lunatic had packed it properly -

He’d abandoned the notion by the time Dearborn spoke again.

“All this, of course, is assuming that Lindow hasn’t left any more surprises in the guts of this thing. We’re getting too close to Balmoral, and if someone doesn’t start trying to shoot us down soon, I’ll be worrying.”

He turned his attention back to finishing his business with the wiring. Paul slumped against the weapon’s casing, and tried to come to terms with the existence of hope.  
He couldn’t have said how long he’d been there when a ringing, tinny voice came at full volume through the loudspeaker on the bulkhead. Dearborn's head went sharply up at the first syllable; Paul couldn’t have said whether it was terror or something else fuelling the sharp blaze of emotion which lit his face.

“...entering prohibited airspace. Your intentions will be presumed hostile unless you acknowledge this signal verbally, or, if you are unable to transmit, by making a deviation of not less than 50 degrees to starboard from your current heading. Over.”

“Yes, Joe, and that’s just ducky,” the American sighed. “If we had some ham we could have ham and eggs if only we had some eggs. Try giving me an alternative that doesn’t involve me having to get round a control panel attuned to the voice commands of a dead mad scientist, why don’t you?”

He started to unroll the webbing straps, and gestured to Paul to inch his way towards the escape hatch. The tinny voice broke in again.

“I say again; your intentions will be presumed hostile unless you take steps to respond verbally or by course deviation. You will receive no further warning. If you do not respond you will be brought down. Over.”

Dearborn cocked his head on one side, his eyes bright. 

“That’s interesting,” he observed, as he started to pass the various straps and buckles around Paul’s body, and to pull them tight. Personally, Paul thought “interesting” was not the word he would have chosen to describe the sensation of being told the aircraft he was in was about to be brought down, particularly by a member of his own side, but pride if nothing else impelled him to assume an air of calm as he said, “Interesting?” as the American, having pulled the last buckle tight, started on the escape hatch latches.

The escape hatch, apparently was being recalcitrant - Paul prayed it was not another part of the airship set up to recognise Lindow’s voice commands alone. Without looking up from his struggles, Dearborn said, “Well, Joe said ‘brought down’ not “shot down”. I wonder if that means he’s going to -”

The tinny voice broke through again, this time with a level of urgency which sounded almost akin to panic.

“Dex! If you’re still aboard, then get the hell out of there any way you can, now. And that’s an order. Skycaptain out.”

“Someone’s been checking parachutes for Legion insignia,” the American observed, setting his shoulder to the escape hatch and giving it a violent shove. A sudden blast of cold air shot into the cabin as it swung clear.

“Hold on tight,” Dearborn yelled, and they were out, out and falling, and it was bitterly cold, and the webbing straps around his body were biting into him, and surely would tear through him like a wire through cheese and God, oh God, had that parachute jammed because it was surely taking forever to open, and they were both going to die, dashed into atoms on the turreted granite monstrosity he could see dimly outlined below him -

There was a rush of silk and suddenly the pace of life slowed right down. The American yelled something which Paul couldn’t catch, but he nodded and grinned like an idiot, because the chute had opened, and it looked like he was going to live after all.

And then they struck.

Red-hot skewers of pain shot up through his body from his mangled leg. He shuddered, his breath coming in harsh gasps, the tiny bit of his mind which was still capable of rational thought reflecting how sound Dearborn's advice to faint on impact had been and wondering how one brought off something like that to order.

Dearborn, who had done what he could to cushion the landing, had slipped the webbing straps that had saved Paul’s life, and rolled away, leaving Paul lying face down on soaking, icy gravel. He had thought that with the enormous throbbing agony which was his leg he would not have minded or even noticed the pinpricks of discomfort from the gravel, but he was wrong, it seemed. His body had the capacity to improvise an almost infinite set of variations on the theme of pain, and he was able to experience them all at once.  
He was abruptly conscious that the toes of a pair of immaculately polished black evening shoes had materialised in front of his swimming vision. He pushed himself up on his forearms, to try to take in more of their owner. The effort was a step too far; abruptly a wave of nausea overtook him and - the shoes’ polish was suddenly no longer quite so immaculate.

Despite the surrounding racket he could hear a sharply indrawn breath from somewhere behind him.

“Would you be so good as to tell me precisely what is going on?” 

The voice - that of the shoes’ owner, he presumed - was hesitant to the point of stuttering, and curiously familiar. Paul, with infinite caution this time, started slowly to lever himself up into a less ungraceful position.

“I am most awfully sorry, sir,” he was beginning, when his attention was abruptly arrested.

Not only was the slight, fairish man in immaculate - well, make that previously immaculate - evening dress pointing a double-barrelled shotgun right at him, but his features were queasily familiar. In fact, Paul had a few dozen excellent representations of them in his pockets right now.

He gulped, and His Royal Highness King George VI, Emperor of India, Defender of the Faith, took a rather hurried step backwards.

“We - I - they - sir - that is -” he began, when Dearborn snapped, “Get back from the end of the terrace, now - uh, Your Majesty. Right now!”

There was an enormous amount of noise going on - shouting, banging, the roar of plane engines and something that sounded like gunfire, but it was all oddly muffled, as though someone had wrapped his ears in cotton wool. The sky was blacked out as the dark bulk of the airship loomed above them - it was going to crash down in bloody ruin upon them, and no matter that they’d disarmed the weapon, it would all have been for nothing -

And then a plane roared across the sky, turning onto a knife-edge as it carved a path through the desperately narrow gap between the stone wall above them and the airship and - for a moment Paul thought he was hallucinating - looped a cable round the topmost turret, paying it out at incredible speed, wrapping the other end round the nacelle of the airship just below the balloon.

Gravity, friction and inertia warred for a perilous moment, and then the nacelle began, inevitably, to break away from the airframe above it, and the balloon, released of its retarding weight, gained lumbering height and lifted above the battlements. The nacelle dropped away, behind the turret, there was a deafening roar and the castle was silhouetted against a bright bloom of flame.

The small crowd that had gathered on the terrace stampeded frantically away, someone scooping him up into a sort of rough fireman’s lift as they went, but this time, mercifully, he did faint.


	15. The tide turns

Franky's every nerve screamed with urgency, even though she knew the engineers were doing their damnedest, and that any overt pressure on them from the Old Lady would merely lead them to make expensive mistakes. But the Albion was going too slowly for her patience, even with her drive well up into the red-line sector. If they couldn't manage better speed than this maybe they would only make it home in time for the wake, despite the engineers' best efforts, and Simon's - bless him - dogged fortitude, and Ives, of course, whose inspired talent for mayhem had made it possible for them to be on the homeward voyage at all, and the wholly unexpected self-sacrificing heroism of Gibbs -   
Abruptly, unexpectedly, there was a sharp pricking behind Franky's eyes at the memory of poor, gallant, foolish Gibbs, who would never bore a Mess again with the anecdote about the Vicar and the donkey-cart. 

The navigation officer coughed respectfully, and she gave a curt nod in acknowledgement. They were about to cross the Western shore of the Outer Hebrides; they were back in the United Kingdom at last.

Franky barked an order, and a klaxon went off, summoning all the Albion's remaining able-bodied fliers to their planes. She had planned this moment that the struggle aboard the Albion had begun to swing against the mutineers (she thought with grim satisfaction of the well-guarded cells in the bowels of the ship, now stuffed to capacity, and those parts of the sick-bay still groaning (literally) under the weight of the captives brought low by the new, improved Mal. Malefic Anti-Malingering potion which Ives had somehow forced into their systems in industrial quantities).

She moved out from the bridge onto the flight-deck. Someone proffered her a megaphone, but she shook her head. They had taught her at Dartmouth to make herself heard above a full gale without mechanical assistance, and it was nothing more than a light air on the flight deck. Especially given the recent challenge to her authority Franky was not planning to do anything which detracted from her official omniscience and omnipotence.

The fliers were lined up in rows before the assembled, prepared 'birds. She acknowledged them all with a cold, sweeping glance.

"You all know what it is that the Empire faces," she said flatly. "It may be that we are the first help to arrive. I don't know what you will find out there; all I do know is that you are, until further notice, to assume that we are on a war footing, albeit that war has not been declared. Accordingly, anyone whom you intercept in any plane must be required to answer your questions as to name, business and intent, fully, promptly and unequivocally: if the pilot refuses you are entitled to treat that plane as hostile and to act accordingly. I would, however, infinitely prefer prisoners for interrogation to corpses for post mortem."

She favoured them all with her best parade-ground stare, trying to concentrate into it the chill which was reflecting up from the winter Minch which was now below them.

"Treat any appeals for help with sympathy but also with caution. They may be ambushes. Keep your wits about you - and, the very best of British luck to you all."

She gave a nod of farewell and dismissal and the waiting aircraft roared into life, the directing ratings on the flight deck choreographing their departures down the runway at crisp, measured, seconds-apart intervals. They soared out into the Eastern sky over the British mainland, and fanned out in a pre-determined, hunting pattern.

_My hounds are bred of the Spartan kind._

Franky stood out looking after them for far longer than they could possibly have been visible to the naked eye, willing herself to be with them, doing something concrete, vital, dynamic; actually being on the front line of battle, not trapped here as a ponderous rearguard. Eventually, at Simon's touch on her arm (no-one else would have dared to approach the Old Lady in her quarter-deck reverie, she recognised with bleak amusement) she went below to her cabin, to start writing the endless reports which - if there was still an Admiralty to make them to - she would need to have in apple-pie order if she were to ensure that her sword would be returned to her hilt-first after the inevitable court-martial.  
It was perhaps two hours later - certainly it was twilight when she raised her head to look through the porthole - when Ives' knock roused her from her tasks. She summoned him into the cabin; the duties of acting signal lieutenant were obviously sitting lightly on his shoulders, because he had an air of irrepressible high spirits. Momentarily, Franky considered delegating to Ives the writing of some of the trickier portions of her current dispatches - the explanation for Admiralty eyes of precisely how he had come to arrive in her cabin via the ventilation ducting, for example. 

"Permission to report that enemy 'plane has been intercepted and is being escorted in to land by - " He cast a quick glance down at the piece of paper in his hand. "Lieutenants McGough, Henri and Patten, Ma'am. ETA five minutes. Lieutenant McGough added a priority coded dispatch for your eyes only, Ma'am."

He passed it across. She digested it, and her eyebrows rose.

"Ives? Get me a double guard of honour - in their full dress uniforms. I want them in parade formation on the flight deck no later than 4 minutes and fifty-nine seconds from now."

Ives saluted smartly. "Right on it, Ma'am!" 

He had reached her cabin door before Franky spoke again. "Oh, and Ives?"

He turned.

"Tell them I expect them to have live ammunition in all their weapons. And to deploy it on my signal."

She did not bother to see how he took that one, because she was already turning towards her dressing closet, in a frantic effort to dig out her own dress uniform. This was an encounter which would go down in history, and she was not going to meet Destiny improperly dressed.

Less than four minutes later she strode out onto the bitterly chill flight deck, in front of the waiting honour guard. Already in the dark eastern sky she could pick up the lights from a moving constellation; the captured 'plane and its escorts coming in towards the Albion. Franky spared an appreciative thought for the precision with which the three escorting 'planes touched down before and behind the captive: had the pilot they had been escorting had any idea of a suicide plunge into the Albion's superstructure their close formation would have neutralised it.

But, Franky realised, as the hatchway opened and the prisoners began to emerge into the frozen formality of the Albion's floodlit flight-deck, and the honour guard presented their arms to the salute, the pilot might have thought of such a thing had he been caught alone, but not with the precious freight he carried. The impossibly thin, quintessentially chic woman in her furs, and the man on whose arm she rested came down the gangway with - Franky had to admit - a sang-froid she could not have replicated in their circumstances. And, after all, this was not a moment which even she could approach without emotion, although she had not expected to be so moved, and not in this particular way.

A song of her half-forgotten youth made its way unbidden into her brain:

_I danced with a man, who danced with a girl, who danced with the Prince of Wales -_

For the man who stood at the gangway's foot was no ordinary prisoner. Irrespective of his constitutional significance, he had in his day carried all the hopes and ambitions of much of the female portion of one quarter of the Earth's surface: far more than any Hollywood star could or ever would command. And the thin, chic woman on his arm had thrown the dice for the ultimate prize and, it seemed, won - and then had lost everything - and so, it would seem, they had both thereafter chosen to play double or quits with the fate of nations -

Franky realised, abruptly, how small Mosley, their pilot, seemed in their train; cheap and flashy, his hair brushed so it shone with the meretricious shine of patent leather, his thin-lipped face showing to disadvantage as a picture of frustrated ambition, and his whole person overlooked - a tool which had failed and was now to be tossed aside.

Franky smiled genially in Mosley's direction. 

"It's been a long time since we met in Malta, Sir Oswald," she said.

His shark-like eyes flashed with sudden recognition - no small wonder, she thought with a grim sense of satisfaction. Men tend to remember women who have propelled them into the rose-bushes of a Governor-General via a swift knee into their groin. Without waiting for his response, she turned to the other couple.

"In the name of King George VI and on my authority as an officer of His Majesty's Navy, it is my duty to take you into custody on a charge of treason. Pending further orders, if I receive your parole I propose to allow you to remain in house arrest in the Admiral's quarters of this vessel, until we arrive in London and I can transfer you to the jurisdiction of the appropriate authorities."

She meant the Tower, of course; it was, immemorially, where traitors to the Crown were lodged. But what happened after the Tower - especially where the traitor was of the Blood - was also set down in immemorial tradition, and the man standing before her in a Savile Row suit which was - self-evidently - too thin for the weather would know it too. It would be sheer brutality to spell it out.

Her prisoner nodded with quiet dignity. "So be it."

Franky gave a discreet signal with one hand. As she escorted the couple from the flight deck to their quarters all the honour guard saluted. And what they saluted was all of what had been and what could have been in the man before them. Franky flung up her arm with the rest of them - and with the tail of her eye Franky saw Mosley's face, looking down at the lights of the Albion reflecting off the impassive black surface of the North Sea beneath them.

She thought she could decode the words his lips were murmuring repeatedly.

"Saluted, at last," he breathed. "On a British Naval vessel. Over the water."

Franky turned aside to cloak her pity and terror at his meaningless babbling.


	16. Aftermath

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The concluding part of the whole saga

Joe had - for the last few minutes or so - been wondering if Dex would come to him, and, if he did not, what he might do then. One could hardly set off wandering down the icy, elaborate, tartan-wallpapered corridors of what was left of Balmoral, in the hope of finding one's lover amid the splendour and the ruin. But it was not a night to be left with one's own thoughts, either.

Even if the servants talked.

Before he could become too paranoid - or indiscreet - there came a familiar scratch at the door, and Dex - in answer to his polite cough - was revealed, awkward in flannel pyjamas and dressing gown. He thrust himself back against the pillows, and tried to pretend he knew what to say. Dex could hardly have been unaware that he had been prepared to rip the airship from the sky, even once he was certain that Dex was aboard, rather than risk the weapon being deployed against his King. A man would be scarcely human who didn't resent that.

Dex got in first, though. "Have you heard about Charlie?"

A chopped nod - Joe didn't think he could manage more. Heard? When he'd actually seen the Avro, agile and gallant, rear up between him and his certain death at the hands of the smug German manufacturer, and heard the cold clipped tones of the man at the controls as he made certain of his last kill in the only way he could?

Dex was holding out his arms to him, and, abruptly - a brief sharp pricking under his eyelids - Joe realised that Dex was being inconceivably generous; that he was genuinely confused about how matters had been, as far as he and Charlie had been concerned. With horrified realisation Joe wondered if even, perhaps, Dex thought Franks had been some sort of convenient camouflage for Joe's real interest -

God! How wouldn't Charlie - most conventional of men - who was not yet in his grave, let alone cold, have revolved at that thought -!

And then as he saw Dex's stricken expression another thought took him, and his own arms were out, pulling Dex down into his bed and against his body, and stroking, kissing, reassuring. Answering the question that had not been asked.

He had been more unfair than he had realised, these last few years. Since Nanjing, Joe had both known and dodged the knowledge that Dex - the only person who had been able to get past the defences he had thrown up then - had performed flawlessly to support him, reassure him, never asking anything for himself but the right to be there the next time he needed to rest his whole weight upon him in order to continue.

He'd been too blind - too much of a coward - to realise that Dex had needed to him to show he knew it.

It was too late, of course, but nonetheless he let his hands convey his want and his apology as they played over Dex's body.

"Nothing like that. Truly. We had to take out the 'birds," he breathed into Dex's ear. "There was nothing you could do until we'd managed that. And we couldn't have done it without Charlie. Red and I were outgunned today. Without Charlie there would have been a Fascist Government under a puppet king in Westminster tonight. Without Charlie - and without whatever it was you and the Shuttleworth kid did to make sure he could fly again - I'd have been dead tonight too. So don't blame yourself. Understand?"

"I -"

He pressed his index finger lightly against Dex's protesting lips."Ssh. Charlie knew the score, long before he got in the air. That leg was getting worse, not better. The stump was ankylosing, and he's been in chronic pain for the best part of two years now. Rhys let on. Oh, yes I know the rest, too - don't tell me. He was in love with Helen. And she was fond of him - she'd have married him in a heartbeat if he'd ever asked. But she was his cousin, he was twenty years older than her and a cripple to boot. Charlie wasn't planning to ask. And it'd have been another three and three quarter years until leap year - "

Dex turned in his arms, trying to ease his own pain against Joe's shoulder in a frantic clasp. He returned it. But the situation demanded something more. Grown suddenly reckless, Joe breathed in Dex's ear, "And?"

"And?" Dex turned towards him, puzzled. He made his face daring and alive.

"Well, I rather thought that you were volunteering to participate in an illegal practice. Given you're naked -" he blessed his impulse to remove Dex's dressing gown and pyjamas at the first opportunity - "in my bed, you know. Shouldn't we be talking about the constitutional implications?"

Dex, bless him, was blindingly sharp on the uptake. "Of committing an illegal act in a Royal Palace?"

His body was hot and close. Joe pulled him even closer.

"Have you ever read any British history? Where better for it than a Royal Palace? And anyway, why limit yourself to one? You think after today we don't reckon we can count on a pardon for all our sins?"

"How many sins had you in mind?" Dex enquired.

Joe's eyebrows lifted recklessly. "How many were you planning to stay awake for?"

THE END


End file.
